


Peregrine

by nigeltde



Series: El Dorado [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Animal Death, First Time, M/M, Minor Character Death, Raised Apart, Season/Series 02, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-11-30 19:58:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 55,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11470614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: We are what we are, I suppose.





	1. Boston

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to [El Dorado](http://archiveofourown.org/series/769428) and may not make much sense without reading that one first!
> 
> The rating and archive warnings are for the fic as a whole; feel free to drop a note here or via [tumblr](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/) for more info. Unending thanks to the loveliest of lovelies [ WetSammyWinchester](http://archiveofourown.org/users/WetSammyWinchester/pseuds/WetSammyWinchester) for her beta <333
> 
>  
> 
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> 
> [Notes on chapter one.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/162899959281/peregrine-10000-words-by-nigeltde-chapters)

Dean is gone, insensible, to all reason and propriety. He should be sleeping. Sam should move. His knees are sore, on the hard boards, joints bent sharply where he kneels by the bed like a penitent.

“Stay,” Dean slurs.

“I can't,” Sam says, and tucks Dean's blanket under the mattress. He is wanted elsewhere. They have nearly exhausted their money and the patience of their host. There are things that he must do.

“Brother,” Dean whispers, and his fingers push through Sam's hair. Sam can't move. “Brother, brother, brother.”

The morphine has hit its peak and every part of Dean is soft, essential, the deepest grace of God. His pupils are huge and bottomless, crowding out the green. It seems to amuse him to trace circles on Sam's face, featherlight around the points of his cheek, his nose, his eye.

“Tell me something,” Dean says, lilting like a nursery song, nonsensical. “Wise old owl. How did it start?”

The start is too far away, beyond their reach. The men who could tell them are years dead, and all their questions—how did Dean come to be in the woods three states from home, how did Sam come to lose him, why were they never told—are, in Sam's opinion, a waste of time. They have more pressing concerns.

Sam wants to get Dean out of here for many reasons, including: the unholy draft this room is subject to; the creak of the red oak beams as Bourner, the butler, heaves his weight about upstairs; and the owner of the house, who has, despite his pretty words and their long association, admitted Sam on sufferance, an appendage to his medical mystery brother.

The bed was musty and cold, but Sam has heated a brick on the kitchen stove, ignoring the outrage of the cook, wrapped it in cloth, and set it under the blankets for Dean to warm his feet against.

“Brother,” Dean mumbles again, marblemouthed.

Dean's thumb grazes his lashes and Sam turns his face into his palm and kisses it. Dean's fingers are warm, gentle, bracketing his cheek. 

He won't remember.

::

They've displaced the housekeeper, Dean in her bed and Sam on her floor, and it makes him nervous to leave Dean alone with her and her day-work friends about, some of whom he recognises from his previous visits as being cruel, and who have even less love for him now. They never thought he was good enough to come in the front door.

Dr Moore is in the parlour, the ceiling cavernous, bow windows overlooking the street. He is frowning down at a visitor card, and tucks it into his pocket as Sam knocks and enters.

“The patient?” he says, with a distracted air. His old-fashioned chops make him look droopy and fat; Sam had been worried, seeing him for the first time in three years, a changed, harrowed man. But his hands remained as deft as ever.

“Asleep, thank you, sir.”

“Near thing, near thing,” he says, as he had three days ago, and Sam agrees, as he did three days ago. They stand a while longer. On the west wall is a portrait of Jessica, eyes sparkling. It's one of many in the house; she is still a living presence here.

“You had a caller,” Dr Moore grumbles, and pats his side. “I sent him away. Impertinent.”

“His name?”

“Henricksen.”

Sam shakes his head, mystified, eyes his pocket and waits to be given the card. He can only assume it was one of Brady's friends from the Museum. He'd left no creditors or noted crimes behind the last time he'd left the city, and how anyone knows he is here he has no idea. He'd asked to move Dean from the hospital as soon as practicable after the surgery, and Jess's father had such authority there that they never even wrote Dean's name down.

“I sent word, you know, to Fredericks down in Charleston. You are aware that you're not on the roll? Must make classes difficult.”

Sam doesn't answer. Dr Moore checks his watch, replaces it. 

“He doesn't favour you.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Your brother,” Dr Moore says, in emphasised tones that suggest scepticism. “At any rate, he'll be able to stand tomorrow.”

Sam doesn't answer.

“I always liked you, Winchester,” Dr Moore says, frowning out the window. “Thought you had a lot of potential. You have fine hands, fine hands, and a brain too, which don't always accompany. A lot of potential.” He coughs. “I know her passing was a blow.”

Sam presses his lips thin and closed, feels himself darken, and Moore straightens his spine and his morning jacket.

“But I won't have a liar in my house, or a goddamned mute for that matter either.”

“Understood, sir,” Sam says, and turns, removing him from sight.

“Winchester,” he calls, brusque, taking Sam right back to the lecture room and its chalk, the laboratory and its bleach. “Send word if it reoccurs. I make no guarantees.”

“Understood, sir. Thank you.”

“It must have been the most extraordinary thing,” he continues, musing. “How I wish I'd seen it.”

Sam's hand closes around the doorknob, an involuntary clench. He never wants to see it again; like watching Dean getting shot the first time, his back arcing, his legs collapsing. Losing his gun. It had been disturbing in the way of impossible things, to have Dean, one of the strongest men Sam had ever seen, brought so invisibly low.

Dean is still in recovery. It may well be that Sam needs this door to open to him again. He contains his thoughts, and schools his face; bows stiffly, and leaves.

::

The streets are cold and busy, old snow a brown slush and more carriages than pedestrians. On Cambridge Street the proportions reverse, black overcoats flapping. He can't spot anyone out of place.

He turns his back on the river and heads uphill, keeps his face forward and if he's careful he can miss the sign for his old boarding-house, twice now rebuilt from fire. Fresh and clean. Nothing there to say, Miss Jessica Moore, died screaming, in ignominy. 

The neighbours and the whole city of Boston knew, anyway.

He finds himself hating Dr Moore. It's uncharitable, and it happens anyway. The man had always been kind to him, and beyond that he was the only person Sam knew of who could have taken that bullet out of Dean safely and privately. To sell his brother's injury as a curiosity was the only sure way he could think to garner Dr Moore's support.

No one appears to be following him, but he takes a couple of quick odd corners; hops a horse-car down the neck and another right back up the new line on Tremont Street and feels slightly better. Across the channel he stumps around until he finds a house that will take them. It smells like fish but the heating is good and he reserves a room under the name Sullivan, arranges for a driver to call the next morning at the Moore house.

The driver's eyes light up on hearing the address, and Sam can see the price doubling. It can't be helped, with Dean as he is; and it's the best way to shake a tail, if he has one. He has a growing suspicion that he wants to avoid whoever it was visiting Sam's one tie to the city just as his brother was incapacitated.

He buys the _Globe_ and some wordy pamphlets on his return downtown, footsore, as the workday finishes, the bells beating off the stone, the buildings evacuating, the streets bustling. He bumps into several unfortunate gentlemen, just another clumsy student, papers flying.

He'd had some concern that he wouldn't still be able to pull it off after all this time and trial, but it works, something laddish in his eyes, maybe, feeling younger than he has in years, returning to these streets with no need for the city to like him, no need for it to show him what a home might be when it had four walls.

He knows his way, now, and his mind. He has money in his pocket and a room guaranteed, and he has something waiting at the end of his journey greater than his father ever dreamed, and finer than anything all those boys who turned their noses at him could ever hope to see.

::

He steals, brazenly, Bourner too well-bred to stop him by force, two pillows and three blankets from the Moore house to ease Dean's way in the cab. The journey's hard on Dean, the streets uneven, bumping over ruts. Even dosed up he's sweating, blood on his lip from where he's bitten it.

They're on the second floor and he fairly carries Dean up the stairs, the owner fluttering about, alarmed; deposits him on the bed, and heads down for their gear.

Mrs Gillet follows him, scolding.

“You said you had a brother, not an invalid.”

I've got an outlaw, he would say, worse than any you've ever heard of, just to frighten her, if he'd lost his senses. It's close.

By the time he gets back up the stairs Dean has thrown up on floor and is on his knees, feeble, trying to clean it. It's mostly liquid; his appetite has been non-existent. 

“I'm no good on morphine,” he croaks, lashes heavy with the tears that come with being sick, and Sam shushes him, drops their gear and heads back down.

“I won't have anyone dying in here,” she says, handing him a pail and a jug of water.

“No one's dying,” Sam snaps, and solidifies his reputation as an ingrate and a troublemaker to boot. A final trip and he opens the door on Dean leaning, shirtless and broken-shouldered over the basin, spitting, his scapulae like wings, skin white in the morning sun. 

There's no blood on the bandage at least.

“Why'd I let you do this to me.”

“Quit your whining and lie down.” Sam pulls his gaze away, throws the rags in a pail, opens the window. Cold air bursts in and replaces vomitus with fish factory.

He helps Dean to the bed. Dean pulls his blankets up and three seconds later shoves them down again, woebegone.

“The fearsome Dean Murphy,” Sam says, shaking his head, squatting by their packs, digging for coin, and Dean grunts and shows Sam the back of his hand. “You know, before I met you, the rumours had me thinking you'd be ten feet tall with a beard like Moses and a chain of scalps around your neck.”

“Oh, I left that in my other bag,” Dean says, wipes his brow clear of sweat.

“What a disappointment you turned out to be.”

“Like I said to Jesse James, mystery's half the work.”

Sam pauses. “You know Jesse James?”

“Yeah, we got a regular Sunday lunch going,” Dean says, and sits up against the iron headboard with a grimace, making the frame creak. He looks at Sam. “No, Sam, I don't—what, you got a thing for Jesse James?”

“No,” Sam says, colouring. “He's a criminal.”

“You wanna run off and join the James Gang!” Dean laughs, and winces. Serves him right.

“Everyone wants to join the James Gang,” he says, and stands, cheeks burning. “You think you can eat?”

Dean is still grinning at him, sly. 

“No, I'll live on that one a couple of days yet,” he says, and Sam rolls his eyes, checks his pockets for coin and keys.

Dean speaks, soft behind him, as he reaches the door.

“You really thought I'd be some kind of beast?”

It had been a surprise, Sam remembers, to find that Dean Murphy was this young buck hale and strong; and more of one to find himself asking to join up with him, to feel something call in him faint but undeniable. He turns around, trying to figure how to explain it. 

“I guess...I knew you two ways, Dean. I knew your name. And I knew—” he breaks off and taps his temple. Faceless in the vision of Max Miller's death. “Not...details. Not about...what we are. But I knew you didn't kill that kid. And I knew from the moment I met you that you weren't a monster.”

And he'd guessed, eventually and too late, that Masters had arranged it somehow. Had wanted them together. 

Sam frowns, looking down at his hands. This is not something they've broached since their aborted attempts in Eldorado, that the coincidence was too much, being in that cantina together, at the same time, unknown brothers, on the same road to death and demons in the desert. Sam has kept the concern sideways and remote, let it play in the back of his head like a fugue, lines coming together and apart until the melody supervened.

He hesitates, and opens his mouth.

“Does it matter?” Dean asks, quiet. It frightens Sam to be known so well. “Would you change it now?”

“No,” he says, and he can see it spark in Dean's eyes, and can't shake the feeling that he's inviting trouble all the same.

::

It's cold, even with the heating, and it's noisy without, even with the window closed, and within, even with a blanket rolled against the gap under the door. Down the hall is a woman who comes and goes all hours, clomping past to the stairs. Sam guesses she is an actress; Dean jumps directly to prostitute. Either way she carries on a loud vendetta against the student in the next room, a thin, poor, writerly type who only seems happy when he's yelling for quiet. Sam wishes he could have done better, sure that Dean would be healing faster in more amenable accommodation.

They have two single iron-frame beds, a table with a shelf above it, three chairs, a standing mirror, and a trunk. 

They have nothing much to do but read, and talk.

“Tell me about him,” Dean says, scratching his thumbnail on the wallpaper, chin propped on his other fist. They are lying on these terrible squealing beds, Sam on his back, Dean on his front, shifting uncomfortably. “Your—our father.”

Hallowed be his name. Sam has told him some, in the three months since they left Eldorado together. Not the true thing, of course, about himself. But he'd picked out the careful surface details of Mary Winchester's death, and the subsequent crusade. He'd told the names of people Masters and her kin have murdered: Caleb and Irving and Steve Wandell. He'd given Dean the journal, impersonal until one learned to read between the lines, and that had served the purpose of teaching him about the evil they hunted too. 

There was nothing of Dean in the journal, of course. Sam knew the book by heart.

For his own part Dean had recounted, offhand, lighting out at thirteen after Jim Murphy's accident with nothing but a horse, a bible, a bedroll, and a gun. He'd relayed this story with his gaze turned away and Sam saw a vision of him at that age, softness still in his face and hands, those lips and eyelashes like a girl's. It was a picture that made him wholly uneasy, protective of a boy he'd never known.

Mostly, though, they had just ridden, shuffling their way east. The days blended. They crossed the Mississippi down where she was wide and dawdling, stole up through Virginia's new-born elm forests, the trees too young and slim, uncanny and alive with echoes of the dead. But there was only game to hunt; and Sam had no visions, no dreams: not a single one, like Cold Oak had burned them clean out of him. 

They didn't talk so much, or mostly about inconsequential things: this man keeps no watch on his pack; this doe is lame; your tale makes no sense, Sam, he's clearly the Devil, no Puritan would walk with him; that's Venus, Dean, not Mars—shut up, I know, I've seen planets before. After all that had happened, there didn't seem to be too much to learn about each other.

It had been a good ride.

Dean clears his throat.

“You don't have to,” he says, and Sam feels selfish and mean all of a sudden, depriving Dean of his own father. He rolls to his side and props himself up on his elbow.

“What do you want to know?”

Dean swallows, shrugs, switches his attention from flaking wallpaper to the flaking paint of the headboard.

“Was he in the war?”

“Yes.”

“For the Union?”

“Yes,” Sam says, and nothing further, watching Dean nod in satisfaction, and decides then to leave silent rest of it. How to say to Dean, discovering his father: he was a draftee and a deserter. He shamed himself because he did not trust me with my caretaker. I was five.

Dean inspects his nails.

“What was he like?”

Sam takes a breath and tries to keep his voice even in the face of an impossible ask.

“He was tall, about your size, maybe smaller. He was strong. Had dark hair he kept short. Ah, his people came from England, but long ago.” Sam shrugs, a gesture too meagre to encompass his father. “He was the best, Dean. You've read his journal. When it came to weapons, arcana, lore. He left everyone in the dust. Left me in the dust. Other hunters—when they found out who he was they nearly swooned.”

“Better than me?”

“You don't want me to answer that,” Sam says, and Dean smiles, like he likes the idea that he couldn't measure up. In truth, Sam thinks he's better, when it comes to guns at least. 

“You make him sound like a great man.”

“He was,” Sam says. “He saved a lot of people.”

“Saved a lot of people,” Dean repeats, quiet, to himself, and grimaces, turns over to his back even though Sam knows he won't last long on it anyway.

“Put a pillow under your knees.”

“What?”

Sam rolls to his feet and grabs his own pillow, lifts Dean's knees and slides it under. Dean watches him, still cloudy from the laudanum, faint line between his eyebrows.

“Next you're going to tell me he could fly.”

Sam shakes his head, pats him on the knee and goes to close the banging shutters, turns and leans against the sill. Dean making fun stings.

“You don't understand. Back in '70, he chased a ghoulah--”

“Ghoulah?”

“Nasty kind of female ghoul, a flesh-eater. They can change shape.”

Dean makes an impressed face.

“Yeah, exactly. He chased her out of—I think they were calling it Silver City by then. She'd already been through maybe twenty prospectors, pulled them right into the ground. But from him, she fled. He chased her into the desert. Had to shoot his horse. A week in he was sucking the dew off grass, eating insects. This is a ghoulah, mind you, they're born in the sand. By then he looked so weak she just gave up and waited for him. Became a puma, claws like—” Sam demonstrated. “Teeth as long as your arm. Went though all his ammunition. Silver blade didn't work. He killed her with a spear, stripped her skeleton, and took her back to Silver City.”

“He took a souvenir?” Dean raises his eyebrows, and Sam grins. This is the part that Dean finds unbelievable?

“There was a man, a Kurd. He wanted the bones, we wanted his knife. You know my knife?”

“Where were you?”

Sam frowns, taken aback. “With the Kurd.”

Dean closes his eyes and winces, rolls onto his side away from Sam, kicks the pillow onto the ground, an impediment now.

“Teeth as long as my arm, my ass,” he mutters at the far wall. The shape of his head, his shoulders: there's some resemblance, Sam thinks. Not enough to be mistaken from behind, but Dean and his father had that same knowledge of the honest power in their bodies. Tall as they were, they never seemed to feel the need to duck. It was a trick Sam never completely learned.

“He would have been impressed with you,” Sam says, to his back.

“He didn't want me,” Dean murmurs. Sam's not sure if he was meant to hear.

“My guess is he was trying to protect you.”

From what, is the question that neither of them ask out loud. From Sam, is Sam's thinking. Nevertheless trouble had found Dean in all the guises it could; and Sam had found him too, and there's not much any more that could convince Sam to regret it.

::

Dean is insufferable, once his pain stops occupying him. He won't read more than half a page of any book Sam finds him. Dice bores him. Checkers bores him. He cleans the guns so often they run out of flaxseed oil. He cuts his beard close and lets the trimmings fall below the mirror like a barbarian. He makes Sam smuggle in a two-foot square of pine and teach him how to throw underhand. They practice with a carving knife Sam happens upon in the downstairs kitchen drawer.

After a few days he can move well enough to make it below for meals. He's still got his muscle, but he didn't have much fat to start with and he's lost most of it and it shows on him as something that offends sensibility, his skin too close on his bone.

Mrs Gillet makes it her personal mission to feed the sorry creature, baked beans and bacon every breakfast and a store of candy on the sideboard specifically for him. The actress helps herself anyway. The student glares at Sam like Sam has personally eaten bacon off his plate and hisses something coy about thumping noises.

They receive a package from Texas, two letters addressed to Dean and a flutter of papers that he hands over to Sam. Sam scans them while Dean reads Singer's letter: transcriptions in several hands; a yellowed newspaper clipping; a wedding notice; a birth notice, and another; a report of a fire.

Much of it Sam already knew, a halfway incomplete knowledge omitting the most important fact.

So far they haven't talked much on this side of things. There is only so much that can be assimilated, after two decades of living. Brother was strange enough, and father. 

Now mother.

Dean looks at Sam across the table.

“Mary Winchester, née Campbell,” he says, the letter rustling in his hand. Sam nods. Confirmation. He had not expected anything less, really; the way his father had spoken about Mary suggested that there was no other woman for him. But the possibility had been there; and they did not favour each other. 

“Pleased to meet you, Dean Winchester,” he says, unsure of what he's feeling, unsure of what shows on his face. Dean's eyes are dark, intent, tracking Sam as he stands and slides the papers across to where Dean's hands are resting numb.

He takes Singer's letter in return, carefully worded and distant, like he knows it won't be only Dean's eyes on it. Minor tales from the home front: Deputy Mills got a new horse, and sends regards; Cold Oak remains abandoned and unclaimed. And more significant: Gordon Walker was sighted in Rhode Island, paired up with some dubious fanatic, but has since been reported in Baltimore and Jacksonville; this pattern drawn large enough may well trap a demon within its bounds; and the histories of those dead Harvelle hands, as far as Singer can tell, identical to Sam's.

This last was a fact Sam had guessed for himself, noting their uniform ages. The trap is news, though, and he commits it to memory with an ill feeling of too late, protection he had needed years ago. 

Dean sets the clippings aside, picking up a letter from Cassie Robinson. 

Sam turns away, hollow, and takes the water jug downstairs for lack of something else to occupy him. It's still half full.

Mrs Gillet is descaling haddock in the sink, her son with his schoolwork at the table, chewing on a pencil as she discourses on fractions.

Sam pauses in the doorway, lingering, unwilling to intrude.

“Mr Sullivan,” she says, her head coming up, hard eyes in her round face. “Were you born in a barn? It's polite to knock.”

“Sorry, ma'am,” he says, and the boy grins at him gaptoothed and merry, his mother's ire directed elsewhere, and shifts his eyes behind in case Sam's brother is following. Sam turns his head also, but of course the hallway is empty.

Me too, kid, Sam thinks at him, smiling privately, and ducks his head to come in.

::

The horses are in Roxbury, in one of the railway stables, and it disturbs Dean to leave his girl to the tender care of the railway men. Once he's comfortable moving about he spends most of his time time down there. Sam suspects he is riding even though Sam has forbidden it.

Sam spends those hours he is left alone at the card tables, in the less reputable clubs, and skims winnings enough to make them solvent for lodging and food without bringing down the wrath of beaters and gangs and the house. The clubs run at all hours, a perpetual two am with the shades drawn across the windows, swimming with cigars and incense and the smell of men under duress. On Christmas Eve the rooms are heaving, and oppressive with the false cheer of wreathes and baubles.

Most men here are old and uniformly out of style, distinguishable solely by the way they treat the attendants. The few Sam's age are already dissolute and sunk, their smiles thin, their fob watches thrice-pawned. Their conversation is wholly women and horses and a promised packet from their uncle and Sam thinks of Dean waiting for him, six o'clock on Common with snow threatening and the wind arrived, and throws himself into a seat at the five-card draw table and lays down some of the wildest hustle he's ever tried, a four-hand slide of loss with his tells plain as day, too plain for someone with half a lick of sense but not these men. On the fifth he bluffs his way through to a seventy-five dollar pot and takes it all with a Jack of hearts, and flies.

The streets are thronging, clangour and Christmas cheer, the racket of the horse-cars, evening-paper boys at their hawk, the call-and-response of women marvelling at window displays. It takes Sam ten minutes to find his brother pacing the steps of the State House, his overcoat wrapped around close, hands deep in his pockets, mouth buried under his scarf. Dead leaves clatter by his feet and whirl up around and the sight of him pulls Sam like a magnet, crunching through the crowds right up to him, stopping him in his path.

“Well met, brother,” he says, and shows the notes in his palm, and Dean's eyes flick back up to him sharp and gleeful and more alive than anything Sam has yet seen today.

They stop for a steak and stay for a drink, enough to not make the walk back south seem such a chore. Several blocks from their room a little church is erecting a sandstone wall around its departed parishioners, and Dean leaps up its progression, knee height waist height chest height and above, shining, balanced like a gun. He does an awkward, embarrassing two-step along the top.

“Don't die, you fool,” Sam calls to him, trying not to show his amusement. “I just got you fixed.”

“Ah, look at me, I can't die,” Dean grins, holds his arms wide, and hops a tree branch that extends over. “How'd you like to visit Heaven, brother?”

He sits, extends his hand down to Sam and locks his fingers around Sam's wrist and Sam does the same, reaches for the top with his other hand and together they walk him right up the wall in two great steps.

Sam seats himself and wipes his nose. 

“Not so many angels as I'd expected.”

Dean looks up at the sky, overcast and dark.

“Your face scared them all away.”

Sam grins and checks down the street for a policeman or anyone respectable, kicks his heels against the wall. “You know what's behind us?”

“Um, _The Mayflower._ ”

“Close, actually.” Sam says. “Pilgrims by the dozen. Founding Fathers. Patriots. Poets. A Russian princess.”

Dean raises his eyebrows, looks over his shoulder at the thirty headstones.

“Really?”

“No. They're elsewhere. This is just normal people.”

Dean jabs him with his elbow and falls silent, shredding a leaf, spiralling debris out into the air. He looks pale and perfect in the gaslights, chewing on his bottom lip, eyes downcast.

“Kinda figured you didn't really like the city.”

Sam tilts his head.

“I don't mind cities so much. You can hide in a city.”

“We can.” Dean licks his lips, turns his face away. He's so obvious, Sam thinks, and can hardly breathe through the fondness that blooms insistent behind his ribs, spreads glowing through his limbs until his fingers tingle with it. “We can stay here, if you want.”

Sam smiles and shakes his head fractionally.

“We just need to make sure your back sustains. Give it another couple of weeks.” Dean blows out a breath in relief. “You like Boston that much, huh?”

“Aw,” Dean says, and looks at him out of the corner of his eye. “It ain't so bad.”

“You know, there are more people here right now than in all of Florida. And not one of them knows who you are,” Sam says. He watches thought sink in. 

“Except for you.”

“Except for me.” Sam stares down at his hands in a futile effort to hide his rising smile. Dean coughs and fishes in his inside jacket pocket, hands over a package; a book, Sam sees when he takes it, wrapped in chamois. The leather falls away and he frowns a moment, trying to place it: Bruno, _Theses De Magia_ , and he knows this very volume, has seen it in the Moore's library several times, his fingers always itching towards it.

He looks up at Dean, wide-eyed, baffled enough to feel precarious on the top of the wall, his heels digging in for balance.

“You _stole_ this,” he says, hushed, and Dean, the sneak, grins.

“He won't miss it.”

Sam turns it over in his hands, awed. It's a recent volume and the type is crisp and Dean is right; the old man would never have picked it up in earnest. Mrs Moore, on the other hand, might have; it was her library.

“When—”

“I get around,” Dean shrugs, still too pleased with himself, and turns his belly to the top of the wall, lowers himself carefully to the ground. He puts one hand to his back and with the other tugs on Sam's boot.

“I'm cold.”

“You—”

He tugs again, and Sam jumps before he can fall, and never fully regains his equilibrium, stumbling on the steps to their boarding house as they part to let the actress outside, her perfume overpowering.

“Hey,” she calls, peeved, wrapping her tippet close about. Sam pauses in the doorway and looks at her. “I ain't your message boy.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he says, confused.

“Your friend found you then.”

“I found him,” Sam says.

“Well you tell him I ain't your message boy,” she says, nods shortly and turns, strides into the night.

“The lady ain't your message boy, Dean,” he says, when he gets upstairs, and Dean cracks his jaw in a yawn, leans down to pull off his boots.

“Good for her.”

Sam throws his coat on the bed and settles at the table, takes his pen out and writes _SW December 1880~_ on the title page of his new book with a trembling cautious hand, stands and places it on the shelf. He can feel Dean watching.

Dean wants to go, he knows, but it's been good to just—rest. In the more foolish moments of Sam's youth he had pictured himself and his father staying somewhere similar, after their work was done. He had wanted it so badly he had made it happen alone.

This is better.

::

A week later they wash up in a dockside tavern, hustling so half-heartedly they're mostly just playing, a bad crowd to attempt anything brash. Low ceilings, Turkish cigarette smoke and tacky boards and they finish the night with a couple of whalers, taking ten dollars off the table and no one seems to care, not with Dean here.

Dean thinks that people don't like him but it's Sam they sense is wrong with a deep human instinct. Without his name spreading, when he is in a good mood, everyone would be Dean's friend, especially as he is now, another layer shed away in this city where no one knows him. 

One of the whalers, an Indian, has taken a shine to him, seeing a brother perhaps, a mirror of his own hard-tested years, built from the same rough clay shaped finely. His scalplock is braided into a queue, halfway down his back, and he has Iroquois hatchings on his jaw, and the head of a bear showing on his neck, bright and recent.

“Hey,” Sam says, and nods to it. “Did you get that here?”

“Nantucket,” he says, and pulls down his collar so Sam can make admiring noises. “But I know a place if you want one.”

“Poke, if you know a place worth anything I'll eat my arm,” says his friend, a snide old beanpole of a man. He has been losing tonight. “Don't come it genteel.”

Poke reddens and glares at Sam like Sam was the one who spoke. “I'll show you, it ain't far.”

Dean raises an eyebrow. Sam smirks.

“Sam,” Dean says, with evident alarm. “What in hell you think you're planning?”

“Finish your beer, Dean,” Sam says, and downs his own. “You're gonna need it.”

“If it's a squaw with a razor and a tin of fireplace scrapings don't say I didn't warn ya,” leers the beanpole, and Poke stands and throws his cards on the table.

“Fuck you Jenny.” He shoves his coins in his pocket, grabs his coat and cap, pulling it down over his ears.

“You lost your mind?” Dean hisses, as they follow him out the door. The air assaults them, snow swirling. “You drunk? I don't want a tattoo.”

“You're getting one,” Sam says, and slips on the ice. Dean grabs his elbow to steady him, keep him moving forward.

“Good Lord, you are drunk.”

“Anti-possession, Dean.” Sam grins at him. “You get it? I should have thought of it ages ago.”

“Anti—” Dean lowers his voice further. “ _Demon_ possession?” Sam nods. “And it works?”

Sam nods again.

“Well,” Dean says, dubious. “Maybe. But I'm gonna need another drink.”

::

The barber has rum a-plenty for him, at ten cents a shot. Dean gets them lined up and clinks glasses with Poke while Sam draws the design.

“Uh,” Sam says, “my circle's a little screwy—”

“Jesus save me,” moans Dean, and Poke laughs, claps him on the back. The barber, a tiny man with forearms like a gorilla, frowns down at the drawing.

“This looks like Satan stuff. I won't do Satan stuff.”

“No no,” Sam says, “this is uh, this is St Michael's Star.”

“Hmm. I got only blue.” The barber pushes his glasses up his nose. “You want all that solid colour?”

“No,” Dean says. Poke laughs again. The bottle rings on glass.

“Yes,” Sam says, “and blue is fine. Over the chest.”

“Young man.” The barber beckons to Dean and pulls a copper tin off the fire, takes his needles out and dries them. “Young man, come here and take your shirt off.”

“Sam first,” Dean says. He grabs at the drawing and stills; frowns, and looks at Sam.

“No,” says Sam. “I don't need one.”

Dean's eyes drop to his chest and it turns Sam's stomach, queasy, exposed, like Dean can see right through to his skin; like he can see how Sam had screamed and fought even after swearing he wouldn't, that he didn't need the ropes. His father had been so disappointed in him.

He turns away and joins Poke by the rum; pours with great concentration, head bowed. He hears the rustle of the drawing, clothes, movement, and when he looks back Dean is laying on the long chair, shifting to get comfortable.

It's not that Sam hasn't seen him shirtless countless times already—he has seen Dean wash, change, swim, in surgical examination—but his form is back, and his skin picks up the firelight like it's the sun itself. It steals Sam's breath.

The barber draws his stool near and starts to strop his razor.

“You won't need that,” Poke says, quiet, and Sam hates him for being here, for getting to see Dean like this, even as he privately agrees; Dean has four years on him and Sam has more hair by far.

“Where?” the barber asks, and holds up his pot of cream.

“Here,” Dean points, unerring, and flinches when the brush comes down, waves for another drink. “Keep em coming, Poke, friend.”

“You'll bleed more,” the barber warns.

“Blood is good,” Sam says, settling in, and Poke makes a sound of affirmation and picks up the bottle.

::

Poke helps him carry Dean down to Broad Street and they wait for the owl-car, drawing their coats close about, pulling Dean out of the road when he totters down into the gutter.

“Heave away, heave away,” Dean hums, hanging off Poke's arm like a rope. Poke takes his weight with ease, settling back on his heels. “We oughta go to sea, Sammy. No demons on the waves.”

“It's only demons out there,” Poke says, and reels him in. “Demons and assholes.”

“We'd fit right in.” Dean slings an arm across his shoulders, grins at him. Poke gazes back, eyes soft and uncertain.

“Maybe you would.”

“You'd break your fucking neck Dean,” Sam says, turning up his collar, checking again for the car, willing it to creep around the bend.

“What other tattoos you got? Poke, friend?” Dean says, and thank Christ, there it comes, and Sam hails the car, keeps his eyes fixed on it, guts churning. The horse's breath steams while he pays and Poke shoves Dean up the steps and looks at Sam.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” he stammers, and Sam shakes his head no and says thank you and farewell and forsakes him, pulls his brother away down the aisle without looking back, finds them a seat as far from the door as Dean can stagger to.

“Sam,” he sighs, lolling against the window, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. He lifts the neck of his shirt and looks under, mutters, “ah fuck, it's coming through the bandage, you get me into the craziest shit, Sam, God's honest.”

“Don't mess with it.”

“I never had one before,” Dean says, and glances up at him. “Will it heal faster than a brand?”

“Yes,” Sam says. “If you don't mess with it.”

Dean resettles his shoulders against the window and winces again. Turns his eyes on Sam and waits. 

“Don't give me that look,” Sam says, trying to be irritated.

“No look,” Dean says, offended, looking. Maybe he believes it too. Sam scrubs at his face and tries to set his mind so he can relate it without remembering it.

“He made it with wire. We needed to get it done fast, healing be damned.”

Dean nods. “It's old.”

“I was fifteen.” That sits there a while. He picks at the seam of his trousers.

“And this?” Dean touches his own neck, running along where Sam's scar is.

“That was why we had to get it done fast.”

Dean is silent a minute. “Anti-possession,” he says, heavy with meaning. Sam feels weary down through his bones. 

“Sometimes I would run away. You got a drink?” Dean shakes his head, and Sam sighs. “I ran away. A demon found me. He—it found me and took me back. It—it wore me back.” 

He darts a glance at Dean.

“I suppose it wanted to kill him,” he says, looks away and chews on the inside of his cheek. No supposition about it. Azazel had told him outright. Had shoved him down into the hollows of his body and said son, I hope your father's screams are as tasty as your mother's. “But he could tell it wasn't me. He—he called its bluff. The demon fled before it could die.”

“He might have—”

“It was the right move,” Sam says, hard. He knew how it sounded, but his father's will was the only thing that had kept him free. “We killed him a month later.”

“Oh, well fine then,” Dean says, sour.

“After what he did to us?” Sam folds his arms, rigid, cold. “You bet, fine. Killing him was the most important thing. It just was.”

Dean makes a placating affirmative noise and pats him on the knee, takes a look around the car.

“Hey, where's Poke?”

“Left him behind.” Sam doesn't feel bad about it. He'd seen the way Poke tracked the rise and fall of Dean's breath while he was on the chair.

The car eases to a stop and more passengers sidle on, theatre ladies and their pearls eyeing the miscreants in the back and staying away.

“You would run away,” Dean says, and when Sam looks over underneath the exhaustion and the glowing washed-out remainders of pain there's fright, the sad futile spectacle of Sam's life, a story he'd tried hard as he could not to live in the first place, let alone recount.

“Your brother's a coward, Dean Winchester,” he says, dry and distant. “Sorry to report.”

“If you think that's what I think then your problem ain't cowardice, it's idiocy.”

“Maybe I've got a lot of problems,” Sam says, ghosting a smile, and Dean reaches a lazy hand and cuffs him on the ear, closes his eyes and shuffles down until he can rest his head on the padding of the seat, shoving his knees into Sam's space. As though they've reached a communal agreement the other passengers also fall into a lull, and the car glides down Federal, frost encroaching on the windows, the bleach-boned street trees, the warehouses and the factories and the inns, tall and permanent, outside of any season or changing year.

“You still...” Dean says, quiet, eyes closed, lashes dark, and hesitates. Sitting next to and above him, Sam takes in his faded freckles, the neat frame of his beard and the bowed pout of his lips and the curve of his broken nose, the only imperfect thing about him, and runs hot, that yearning come upon him again, sick and strong. He'd thought he'd managed to lash it down. “You still get that running feeling?”

“No,” he says, and watches the corner of Dean's mouth twitch upwards.

::

More letters from Texas; Sam takes the package reluctantly, resenting the intrusion of the outside world. It's Singer again, on increasing reports of demon possessions, and fairly certain that Masters had been the daughter of a demon named Azazel. Sam is just glad that they worked it out for themselves.

And Robinson again, who has sent Dean what looks like clippings from her paper, that Dean smiles over, and a letter that Dean takes to the window for the light. He doesn't mention its contents but his smile fades, and later that night they go to a place with girls. 

Sam doesn't know how he sniffed it out—Brady had always been the one to know where to go—but by midnight Dean is fizzy with champagne, and has a girl sitting in his lap, and he is looking up at her with a merry pink grin. She seems very pleased with what she has landed. 

He is not a hound. Sam has been watching, these last months, and he knows that much. He seems to be happier lifting his hat than really talking to a woman. When they are in mixed company he gravitates towards those who don't mind it dirty or dangerous, but Sam has seen the longing glances he casts towards respectable women.

He would have loved Jess, who had all of those qualities, in abundance: rich enough to be bred in propriety, smart enough to scorn it; who had thought nothing of seeing him in his rooms unchaperoned; who had been appalled to hear that Sam did not write his father, or even know his location, and who later in their acquaintance called John Winchester a scoundrel with the fierceness of someone who'd never had death hinge upon the outcome of an order.

He hadn't told her much. He had told her barely anything, in truth. There had been nothing to say. Azazel was dead. He had released himself from the crusade once the years made it clear that his father could not, and he had gone out to be a part of the world. And she had been generous enough with hers to make him a space in it.

And then she had died.

::

Looking back he can see that it was Masters, likely, that had killed her. Revenge perhaps for her father, or maybe just another rung on the downward ladder she had ready for Sam. Either way Jess had paid the price for knowing him.

The city suddenly reeks of her. She had loved art; every car they see is the Museum line. She had taken tea here; she had bought her dresses here; she had kissed him by this print shop in Scollay Square and made his knees shake in time with the rattling awnings.

Sunday he takes Dean to morning prayer at Trinity Church. He lets Dean believe it an impulse visit.

He shaves with extra care in the morning, and washes his hair. Dean keeps finding reasons to scruff his hands through, manhandling him into a pew in the back, elbows hooked over the backrest. He tugs at Sam's hair and points up to the stained glass, the dove.

“Holy Ghost,” he says. “Think salt would work on it?”

“Hush,” Sam says, scandalised, red, and Dean grins, wide and wicked. He believes in God, Sam is fairly sure; but in the abstract careless way of people for whom belief makes no material difference, who have had to make their own luck, and for someone raised by a pastor the trappings don't seem to interest him at all.

Dr and Mrs Moore file past, down to their seats at the front. Dean shifts when he notices them, and tugs Sam's hair again and quiets, chastened, and Sam is here in some obscure and vain attempt to visit with her, to regain some peace, the humblest petition he could ask, and all that fills his head is the heat of Dean next to him and the tension his body held as the ink and blood mixed and the noise he had made when Sam touched him in that tiny whitewashed church back in Texas.

He puts his hands on the pew in front of him, leans forward to rest his forehead on his knuckles. He closes his eyes. Dean's knee bangs against his. Sam's heart wrenches sideways.

It's no secret to Sam that he's an abomination, but there are times when he manages to forget, and to be reminded in a place so holy, Jessica's memory so newly raw, is a cruelty.

“I saw her portrait,” Dean says as they leave, following Sam as he stands abruptly before the service ends. “She was very beautiful.”

“Yes,” Sam says shortly, and stalks on ahead across the square, and is saved from having to answer for his rudeness by a man who rises from a bench as they pass and doffs his hat.

“Mr Murphy,” he calls, so unexpected that they freeze and give the game away right there, Dean's hand flying to his hip. He had refused to go unarmed even to church.

Sam tilts his head and steps forward.

“No trouble, sir,” the man says, palms up, easy smile. He's black, dark, with a New York accent, a neatly-groomed beard and quality clothes that have seen hard travel. He's wearing guns. A scar pulls one of his eyes out of true, the lid healed down over its corner. “I'm just here for your companion.”

“What do you want with him?”

“This doesn't need to be unpleasant, Murphy,” the man says, switching his gaze to Dean, nodding at their surroundings. It's a busy bright Sunday morning, families and sweethearts and a man selling chestnuts, and the church about to empty. This is the visitor, Sam realises, from way back; from the Moore house. Henricksen. What patience he had. “This is about St Louis. Are you capable of doing the right thing?”

“You should be on your way,” Sam says.

“He ain't going,” Dean says, cold. “He's after a bounty.”

“What did you do in St Louis, Dean?” Sam says, and Dean glares at him. 

“He killed a woman,” Henricksen says, hard, his prettiness dropping away. He's a veteran, Sam figures, and evaluates down their chances of scaring him off. “He sliced her neck to navel. In her bed. Next to her children.”

“If you know who I am,” says Dean. “Then you know you'll regret coming after me.”

“There weren't many willing to risk it.” He shrugs. “I reckon one madman is much the same as another. And if he's injured...”

“What courage,” Sam sneers.

“Mr _Winchester_ ,” Henricksen says, steely, with such import that Sam is able to prepare himself for what is coming. “I suggest that you stay out of it. I would hate for the Doctor and his wife learn what kind of man you brought into their home. And I would hate for them to learn about the vagrant they let into their daughter's bed.”

Dean sucks in a hissed breath behind.

“I don't care for their opinion,” Sam spits. “Let them curse my name. Let this whole city burn again and them in it. I don't care. Leave us alone.”

“You let your friend take the blow for you, Murphy,” Henricksen says, and Sam steps forward to block before Dean can get to him, and Dean shoves him to the side anyway.

“It won't work,” he says, stony, sure and dangerous, his shoulders wide, and his hand hasn't left his hip. “Get out of here.”

Henricksen settles his hat on his head and flicks the brim, gives them a long glance; turns and leaves, ducking easily through the crowd. Dean watches him walk away with narrow eyes, an aged, tight look on his face that Sam had forgotten, that he hasn't seen in weeks; months, since Eldorado, all of Dean's experience and the violence he could deal when necessary.

His stomach sinks. They cannot stay much longer. Dean's past, Sam's past. These things are God's wrath held, waiting to come due.

Dean sags down onto the bench, elbows on his knees. 

“It wasn't me,” he says, quiet, and Sam shakes his head, makes a noise to signify no need to say. “I was there. I knew the woman. But it wasn't me.”

“I know, Dean.”

“The man that did it. There's nothing left to find of him.”

“Good,” Sam says, without thinking, and Dean, the only man left to hang for the crime, winces. “Bounty, huh? Dead or alive?”

Dean looks up at him, squinting.

“Bit of both,” he says.

::

Henricksen is indeed patient; they detour into Charleston and back downtown through the evening shadows to shake him and it's pointless: he's waiting for them at their rooms.

“Mr Murphy,” he says genially, as they come in the front door, and Dean's gun is raised and cocked before Sam even places the voice; Henriksen startles back, involuntary, his hand flying to his gun, and Mrs Gillet screams, soft and suppressed. They are standing together in the parlour, tea cooling on the side table. Her son lies on the floor, a book open in front of him, his eyes huge.

Dean's trigger finger twitches, and his mouth tightens, and as the seconds pass a satisfied look comes over Henricksen's face.

“Sam, go,” Dean whispers, and backs up. “Go, _go_ ,” as Henricksen draws, and they tumble out the front door and throw themselves down the dark street, through the park, the thump of Henricksen's boots behind them. He is bold now he knows Dean won't shoot. They dodge across Broadway and nearly die in the doing of it, run all the way to the wharves. 

They pause each side of a crowded dirty alley between buildings, blowing, doubled-over. A nightwatchman clangs his stick two warehouses over. The moon is too bright; Henricksen won't have to work hard to hunt them.

Across the way Dean is checking his guns, trying to make no noise amongst the briney crates, shifting out the way of hanging chain. It hurts Sam to see. He doesn't belong here, hemmed in by brick and marble and steel. 

Sam darts over to hunch with him.

“Maybe it's time we left the city,” Sam says, and Dean looks at him with clear relief. Fifty yards behind them on the harbour side something is kicked and clatters and rings. Henricksen curses loud.

“Steam ship?” Dean whispers. “Jolly Old England? Mexico? The golden rivers of Califor-nye-aye?”

Sam bites his lip. “What if there was someone who could help you remember?”

“Remember?”

“The fire. Our father.”

Dean frowns.

“Another doctor?”

“More like a spiritualist.”

“You trust her?”

Sam shifts. He doesn't like to be around Missouri. Last time he saw her was ten years ago, standing bowed with useless sorrow in her doorway, as his father collected him from another premature flight. She had handed him over without comment. 

But she is on the side of the right. 

“I trust her. But. There's nothing you can hide around her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She gets—inside. She'll read you whether you like it or not.”

Dean turns his face away.

“No.”

“It might be the only way to—”

“Be content with fixing my back, Sam,” he hisses. Sam opens his mouth, and Dean holds up a hand, forbidding. “No. No way and we ain't got time to argue. Go get our stuff. I'll hold him here. Meet me at the stables.”

It's a relief. Sam nods, and checks the exits.

He pauses, looks at Dean.

“You'll meet me,” he says and Dean nods, distracted, edging his way to the end of the alley. “Promise, Dean.”

Dean frowns at him a moment and then grins, fond, familiar.

“Yeah, Sam. I promise.”

::

Sam breaks into Mrs Gillet's house through the kitchen window. He steals bread and cheese and ham from her larder, and upstairs grabs the journal, and packs a bag each and leaves the remainder, the spare scarves, Dean's slippers, the nice woollen city coats that Sam had bought them; and hanging underneath them his father's jacket and its bullet-holes. He pulls one book from the shelf above the table and relinquishes the rest, six novels and a volume of the war poets, to whoever comes after.

They arrive at the stables at the same time, jogging towards each other in the fog, and abandon the city before dawn, on horseback.

::

They rest at noon in a dilapidated field, the fences sagging, the grass brown and rotting where the snow is thin. Sam rests his back against the twisted trunk of the sour apple tree that marks the highest point. He holds his book in his lap and surreptitiously watches Dean lay the tack out on the fence and polish it. Sonny and Dean's girl buck and roam in freedom, glad to be away from the cars and the sorry dull horses that drew them.

It's a crisp and clear winter's day. This is how his brother is meant to be seen, Sam finds himself thinking, fervent, reverential. Like Dean can sense him watching he rubs the back of his neck, lays his cloth over his pommel and turns.

“Toss me one of those,” he calls, and Sam lobs a fallen apple his way. He whistles and his girl lopes over, nudges him and whickers, eats the apple out of his palm, crunching, losing fragments out the side of her mouth. Sonny, ears alert, moves up behind. 

Sam throws another apple, and Sonny lowers his head to Dean's hand. Dean's girl transfers her attention to Sam, steps up the hill with intent, and Sam grins at her and starts a few apples down the hill, some uglier than others, bumping round and red across the snow. She trots after, nose to the ground like a coonhound.

“Hey,” Dean says, injured, watching his horse leave him. Sam throws an apple at him, direct to his chest this time, which he bats to the side, missing the one coming after, a solid thwack, and another in the shoulder. Sonny shies and jumps away, tossing his tail. “Hey!”

Sam laughs and calls him a fool and searches, the ground bare around him, scoots backwards to find something firm enough to throw, quickly now as a maniac gleam comes on in Dean's eyes and he launches ten yards up the slope, dodging another missile. He takes Sam around the middle as Sam tries to rise and Sam hits the ground with a thump, trying to throw him off, in vain, Dean pinning him with ease. Sam's not fought him before and it's a shock how effortlessly he locks down Sam's legs, throws his weight across Sam's chest.

Sam jabs his knuckles into his ribs and Dean's eyes fly open, his hold weakening.

“Dirty,” he wheezes, as Sam scrambles backwards, laughing. Dean grabs him around the ankle and hauls him back in, snow skidding up his jacket. He howls and kicks, and Dean blocks it and takes a heel to the sternum. Sam can feel his mouth spread into a ridiculous grin and Dean purses his lips, glares, slaps Sam's waving hands away and lands with his full weight atop, and it hurts but it's so funny that Sam can barely breathe, his head knocking back on the ground.

“Say sorry.”

“Sorry you're such an easy target,” Sam snorts, and writhes, tries to throw him off.

“Uh uh uh. Say it.”

“Say what?”

“I surrender.”

“I accept,” Sam gasps, tears collecting at the corners of his eyes, and Dean thumps him back down into the ground, too outraged for sentences, scolds _–smartmouth—stubborn—wretch–_ and rolls off him and Sam is still shaking with laughter, his stomach sore with it, throwing his cares high. 

Sam has read books and he has seen people in the world. This is how boys play, how they revel in their present strength, and taste their future glory. It's never happened to him before. He had no idea his blood could beat in freedom. That it could live in him, too.

The field butts up to an orchard which butts up to a house, weathered, the porch listing. A bitch is sleeping in what sun she can find while her pups scrap and tumble, bite at her ears.

A girl, too big for her child's dress, is playing with a doll. As they pass she lifts her hands and waves at them. Dean is distracted by the dogs, but Sam lifts his hand, and she smiles broadly at him and makes her doll wave too, both of them in pink with their blond hair winking.

They walk on and Sam puts Boston behind for the second time, his companion not grief and ash and rage this time but his brother. The murderer Dean Murphy, and the abominate Sam Winchester, and the hills that roll open before them.


	2. Bristol - Over the Hudson - Near Swayzes Mill - Near Carlisle

Azazel is in the shape of John Winchester. He is cooking, stirring the pot as it hangs over the campfire. The smell, meaty, spicy, makes Sam's mouth water. He hasn't eaten in a month, and he can feel his stomach sucking against his spine. It gurgles loudly.

“Hungry, son,” his fathers say, with a small smile. “Give it a minute.”

Sam hooks his arms around his shins, puts his chin on his knees. He is bony and young, always, in their presence.

“How long was I sleeping?”

“Too long,” his father says, but he doesn't seem angry. He resettles his hat and looks up at the sky. It is night, and starless. His beard is overgrown, down to his chest and shot through with grey: an old man's beard, someone done with travel and fighting. 

“I'm hungry.”

“Greedy,” he chides, and winks. “Fetch me that bowl.”

Sam passes it over and he ladles the stew, thick, lumpy with meat cut into rough squares. Sam picks one up and bites. It has a taste like mutton, but it's not; it's tender, rich.

“Aren't you going to have some?”

“What need have I?”

“We all need to eat.”

“My tastes lie elsewhere.” The demon grins a jaundiced wolf's grin then, wicked with teeth. Sam's not worried. Yelloweyes is dead, and this is a dream. There will be no consequences.

He takes another piece of meat, chews. Digs a bit of sinew from his teeth. His fingertips are warm, dipping into the bowl, coated in gravy. He licks his lips, eyes the pot hanging over the fire.

“Go ahead,” his father says. “It's all for you.”

“I don't need your permission.” Sam squares his shoulders. He's seated on a stump, and is taller than the man opposite him. It is very dark outside the circle of the fire. His stomach growls again.

“Eat. You can have anything,” his father says, singing a different tune than he ever has before. There's something wrong with him, his face, the way he holds it. His eyes are different. John Winchester is in the shape of Azazel. “You can have anything you want.”

“Dad,” Sam says, uneasy, quailing, his stomach a roil, rejecting the mutton. He hunches down again. He shouldn't have asserted himself. 

The fire flares, lighting his father's eyes a sickly yellow. His voice bites.

“Take, take, take. Your greed has stripped this land bare.”

“I'm trying,” Sam says, wounded. “I'm trying to be better.”

“Liar,” his father hisses, and folds down off his camp stool and crawls towards him, on his hands and knees, herky-jerky and his belly to the ground with his elbows bent out like a scorpion. His beard drags in the dirt. His eyes are a void. He is by Sam's feet, of a sudden.

“Stop.” Sam launches backwards to get away, thumping to the ground, scrabbling, hands cutting on sharp stone. 

“Sinner. And worse.”

“Please,” Sam says, on his back, and his father crawls up his body, hard muscle and whiskey stench, panic soaring through him. “ _Please._ ”

“Sam,” Dean says, “Sam, hey,” and Sam's shoulder is shaking, being shaken, hard enough to roll him back and forth on the ground; the fire's down to coals, and the flagstones of this busted old church are trying to freeze him through from his right side up. Dean is behind him, in his own bedroll, but a blanket covers them both. “Wake up.”

“'m awake,” Sam grunts, and rubs at his face, pulls his cap down to cover his ears. He closes his eyes and tries to will his heart down to a normal beat, counting his breaths, in out, puffing up the musty smell of himself.

“You want me to get you something?”

“Huh?”

“To eat.”

“No,” Sam says, after a moment. He prays that's all he said out loud. He can remember the feeling of starving, and his only remaining family, and the pot. Meat stringing his tongue. And Yelloweyes. “No, thanks.”

Dean shifts, and Sam can imagine him burrowing deeper into his bedroll, but then an arm lands across him.

“No more dreams,” Dean says, voice deep and sleep-ridden.

“Okay,” whispers Sam, and tucks his nose under the border of the blanket, and shifts backward into his warmth.

::

Snow drives them south and sleet halts them in a village outside of Bristol. They take lunch in a narrow inn, leaning at the end of the narrow bar, their hats pulled low. Sam is keeping an eye on Dean and Dean is keeping an eye on a small commotion in the corner, a well-dressed man trying to haul a drunkard off the boards, kicking him and ignoring his cries and rambles. He bends to rifle through the drunk's pockets, and the man has no friends to stop him.

Dean throws back the dregs of his cider, pushes his plate away and heads over, stands immovable in the assailant's path. Sam idles along the bar into clear space, a palm to his knife.

Dean says something, and the man replies curtly and tries to shoulder past. Unsuccessfully: Dean at his full height and firm, laying a hand to his chest, and the man stills, narrows his eyes. He's a greybeard, and has need of a stick, but underneath his smart coat and kid gloves is a certain steel and solidity, enough to take him seriously.

They exchange more words, brief, and Dean cuts a glance at Sam, nods for him to join them.

“You'll have to split the fee,” the man is saying.

“Harper here's got a job just opened up,” Dean says to Sam. Sam raises an eyebrow. “A night's guard duty.”

“Guarding what?”

“Guarding who. My employer has—” Harper breaks off and for the first time looks slightly unsure. “Reason to believe he'll be the target of an attack.”

“Attack from what?” Sam says.

“Dogs.”

“So he's a lunatic,” Dean says, after a moment.

“He's one of the most successful men in the county,” Harper says, bristling. “It's easy money, and you'll be inside for the night.”

It wouldn't be so bad to hide from the storm in a rich man's house, Sam figures, and makes a why not face at Dean, who grins, bends and slips a coin in the drunkard's pocket. They step over his snoring form, and follow Harper's cane out the door.

They never meet their employer, who has barricaded himself in the upper rooms. Harper installs them in the rear of the house, tells them to keep their guns loaded, and to call if they spy someone with—he sighs— _dogs_ , and heads back towards the front.

Dean finds the kitchen within seconds and charms some leftover roast and potatoes from the cook before she leaves. There's plenty remaining. The boss is overtaken by madness and barely eats any more, she informs them. What wealth he'd had! Material, five mills and a foundry; and familial too, married and gay. How quickly he had fallen! Dismissing everyone but herself and his man. Their dogs slaughtered, even the wife's little Chérie. He cowers in his room like a child. 

“He's touched,” she says, tying a scarf over her head. “Irretrievably. You shouldn't indulge him.”

They are sorry to see her go, the whole night stretching out, blanketed and shut in by the rain. They pull the table over to the stove and huddle by it under the extravagant light of a ten-armed candelabra. Sam loses at solitaire. Dean swipes his finger across the bricks and writes his own name in greasy soot on the underside of the pot shelf, and then Sam's, and then GIRL in thick black letters, and then he tips candlewax on the table and paddles his fingers in it, peels off hardened shells.

“You are incorrigible,” Sam says.

“I'm bored,” Dean says, flicking one at Sam. It pings Sam in the forehead and Dean smirks at him like it's just desserts. “And you are boring.”

“You're a grown man,” Sam says, without consideration, “I'm sure you can find a way to occupy yourself.”

Dean chuckles.

“Sometimes,” he says, and Sam blushes and lays his cards down, stands and grabs a candleholder. 

“I'm going to take a look around.”

Five mills and a foundry has netted this man an estate bigger and emptier than any Sam has been in before; in the hall his footsteps echo off the high ceilings and peacocked wallpaper and glossy boards, and in the drawing room he's almost swallowed by the carpet. Sheets drape the furniture, ghostlike, and it sets his nerves on edge, matching frequency with the thrumming rain.

The entryway gaslight is blazing, but the circle of its light is small and unprotected. Harper is slumped in a displaced armchair facing the door, a rifle across his lap, eyes closed. Sam watches a moment to make sure he's breathing. 

On the other side of the hall is a library.

Shelving the full height of the walls, cast iron fixtures. Gold leaf picks up the candle and he walks the perimeter, bumping his thumb along the spines. Business periodicals; family almanacs; _Birds of Connecticut With Plates_ ; theology blending discreditably into a trove of gothic romances and horrors, _Otranto_ and Poe and Irving and more accounts of the uncanny and mysterious. 

Someone in this house had taken a keen interest. 

He slows at the sight of Milton in a single volume, sets down his candle and pulls it out, yellowed and old, re-bound recently. He smells the pages. Flips through, and his eye catches on an underlined word.

The wind picks up outside, an eerie howl.

A hand takes his elbow. 

Dean. 

His face shows nothing; the candle flickers deep in his eyes. He seems ancient here in the dark. He could have been there an age. Sam draws in a soft breath.

Something thumps on the floor above them. They look up at the same time and Dean's fingers tighten around his elbow.

“You hear that?”

Shifting, dragging upstairs, furniture across thick carpet. Or a body.

“Hellhound,” Sam whispers, stomach sinking, and drops the book and runs, Dean a step behind. He could kill himself for missing this. He should have realised: the rain, the obsession, the specificity of the job. 

Ten years ago, when Sam was digging unsettled bones out of the ground and his brother was carving himself into a wandering gun, this man traded his soul to the devil Mammon for a fortune, now useless, and a marriage, now derelict, and a house, now desolate.

They are at the top of the stairs when the screaming starts. The sky answers in a crunching rumble. The masonry shudders. Rain slams against the front of the house.

Dean shoots the lock off of the bedchamber door and Sam kicks it open onto carnage. The man is in pieces.

There is, as there always seems to be, more blood than should be possible.

“What have you _done_?” Harper cries, behind them, horrified, fury rising in his face, and fear, taking in the scene, and Sam says, foolishly, in the empty room, with the locked doors and the sodden red carpet and human meat—

“It wasn't us.”

“Don't,” Dean warns, cold and certain, gun aimed between Harper's eyes even as he's bringing his rifle up, and he clutches and pushes in Sam's clothes and they skirt him and stumble out, throw themselves down the stairs. Dean shoves him in the back along the drive, around to the carriage house, pelted with rain and the lightning so close it comes with the thunder. Sonny screams and kicks his box as they burst in, but stands steady enough for Sam to throw his saddle over and accepts a hurried bridling, and they snatch their bags and are away.

::

They start in the dark and ride all through the day into dark again, fast but steady, too enveloped around here in farmland, never it seems out of sight of a spire. They are lucky that the rain stays on, sometimes furious, sometimes a drizzle; the roads are almost empty.

They weave the hills into New York; sleep for three hours apiece in a leaking barn, acrid with massed millipedes; give the horses the last of their corn and oats; and start again before dawn, as the cows start up the slope, lowing. 

The rain has finally rained itself out into bright white high cumulus, and the sun, when it finds them, steams their outer layers and some of the leather dry. By late afternoon they've put the river between them and Bristol and are far enough away to let their exhaustion dictate their movements, setting up camp in an oak stand. 

Dean rubs the horses down, checking for saddle sores and hot spots, and Sam finds some clear space and a few flammable twigs for kindling and sets a hell of a fire going, big enough to dry out its own wood, cheerful and loud and pursuers be damned.

Salthorse and biscuits, tea and warmth. Sam's muscles unlock into a drooping heavy fatigue, and he chuffs away the top layer of leaves until he finds something dryer, spreads his oilskin out and builds himself a little nest of blanket and bedroll and book, waiting for his brain to slow down to meet his body enough for sleep. Dean kicks a log free of beetles and slugs and perches on it, checks and cleans his guns, muttering about damp. Sam is fully aware that they are in perfect condition.

The sun goes down, spare cold rays penetrating the trunks, and the bats come and then the owls, all unseen.

“What are you reading?” Dean says, after a long silence, poking at the coals. Sam shows him the cover and Dean pinks somewhat, pleased, recognising his stolen gift. “Is it good?”

“It is,” Sam says. “He says that there is universal spirit, and that magic works upon the bonds between this world soul and bodies. He gives a very thorough accounting.”

“There any spells in there to get rid of bad luck?”

Sam frowns.

“What do you mean, bad luck?”

Dean shrugs, gaze stuck on the fire.

“Something about me always sends these jobs wrong.” He shrugs again, feigning unconcern, leans back out of the immediate heat and blows a whalespout of frost into the air.

“It doesn't have spells, per se,” Sam says, watching the light swim on Dean's neck, fire the copper in his beard. He lowers his eyes to his book and sees _De vinculis spirituum_. “But, um.” He reaches behind, fishes in his pack for the little drawstring pouch, tips out the shot. He had washed it after Dr Moore handed it to him, and it gleams dull and deformed in the firelight. He had thought to keep it for himself.

“What you got there?”

Sam reaches over and lays it in his palm. 

“You think you got bad luck?” Sam says. “Most men would have died.”

“Good luck, bad luck,” Dean murmurs, turning it over between his fingers. “This wasn't my luck.” He looks at Sam. “It was yours.”

“Say what?”

“I killed a kid. And I got shot for it and I lived. I should never have lived.”

“You're strong.”

Dean shakes his head. 

“Cold Oak. That was why. I still had a job to do.”

The name of that place makes Sam chill. He doesn't like to remember Cold Oak and says nothing. Dean rolls the lead in his palm and tosses it in the fire, sombre, his mouth drawn down in thought.

He is so beautiful.

“You got it backwards,” Sam says, quiet.

“Hmm?” Dean takes a drink from his flask.

“My—our father in his cups, when he was—when he was really gone—he would say that there was something important to tell me.”

“Sam,” Dean says, heavy, like he's trying to break bad news.

“You're the important thing.”

“I'm no one, Sam.” 

Sam shakes his head and sighs. “You've got a skull denser than a bear's.”

That gets him a smile, finally, Dean's eyes crinkling. “Yeah, you ain't the first to say that, clever boy.”

“You should be in a freakshow, the thickest man alive.” Dean throws sod at him and Sam ducks, protects his book, blows dirt out of the spine. “The human marvel, how does he even stand upright?”

Dean purses his lips and glares.

“I'll get you for that one. Some time when I ain't so comfortable.”

“It takes three men to get him to his feet. Babies cry to see him. Women faint from revulsion.”

“Mother—” he springs across the five feet of space and tackles Sam.

“The book,” Sam yelps, bringing his elbows up in defence, “watch the book!”

Dean rips it from his grasp and tosses it to the side, pinning Sam down into his bed as he tries to squirm out from underneath, almost rolls clear and then Dean has Sam's wrists in his grasp and he is straddling Sam in a kneel, and they are nearly on the fire.

“Tease, brother, you're a tease,” Dean says, tight, intent, the whole of him so close looming above. Sam loses all his fight: heart pounding, he could melt into the ground, he could boil over. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

Sam rolls his head back and forth, twigs digging into his scalp, testing Dean's strength, flexing to try to bring him down closer. He bites his lip and Dean's gaze flicks down, black, untrammelled, and his voice is just as dark.

“Anyone ever make you pay for it?”

It might be something Sam would beg for. Sam groans, tries to shift his hips but Dean is too heavy. His cock is filling, urgent, and Dean is just— _managing_ him, could do this to him any time, could make him pay for all that he is and he'd love it.

He wings a desperate pleading hope to the sky, twists his wrist out of Dean's grip gone loose and lays his palm on Dean's thigh, firm. Sam's hand is big enough to span its width. Dean looks at it.

He runs it higher.

Dean explodes to his feet like Sam's touch burns and stands there, frozen before flight, staring down at him wide-eyed as Sam lays, dying with want, exposure, denial.

“Dean,” he whispers, aching.

“Horses,” Dean says, voice thick; gestures numbly at the darkness between the trees, and lurches away.

They don't wrestle again.

::

In the morning Sam scuffs through the ashes of the fire, sifting it like chaff until he finds the lead, two small discs, grey and dull, and pockets them, once more a secret.

Dean brings the horses over. Sam rubs his fingers through Sonny's shaggy winter coat, hides his face against Sonny's neck.

“I'm sorry,” he says, eyes forward as they ride. They took breakfast separately, if Dean even ate, and neither of them has said a word since they saddled up. He could only stomach a scrap of food himself, twisting and ill with regret.

Dean scratches at his beard and sighs, tilts his head at the sky like he needs to gauge the sun, invisible behind a threatening grey roof.

“Sorry,” Sam says, panic rising. “It won't happen again. You have my word.” He just barely closes his lips around the rest of it, shameful and afraid: don't leave me.

Dean sighs again.

“You gotta trust me on this, Sam.”

“I trust you,” Sam says immediately, pathetic, and Dean shakes his head like Sam doesn't understand.

“Putting aside the fact that we ain't got a choice in the matter? Putting aside considerations of natural law? And man's?”

“I know,” Sam says, and pauses; and then, because he is too stupid to bear himself sometimes: “Some things can be put aside.”

Dean sends him a perturbed look out the corner of his eye.

“Not all things,” he says, plainly, like Sam was raised by wolves, never had occasion to learn morality, never had good and evil beaten into him by the world.

“Law,” Sam sniffs, feels himself grow bitter. “Most people wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire and you subsume your understanding to theirs.”

“It ain't about—there's a way of things, Sam. You talk like a man who's had family.”

Sam clenches his jaw.

“What good is family?"

Dean reins up and glares at him.

“You don't know,” he accuses. “You don't know what it's like to not have anyone who _has_ to care for you.”

They stare at each other. Sam can see the divide but has no honest idea how to bridge it. Is that what he thinks family is?

“Brothers is better,” Dean insists, with a note of despair, like he doesn't know what he'll do if he can't make Sam understand. “Brothers is...” he stalls, searching for the word, frustration twisting his face when he can't hit upon it. “For sure. It's how it was supposed to be. You see that right? Sam?”

“I see that,” Sam says hurriedly. “I see, Dean,” and Dean's lips curve sour and he nudges his girl on and keeps treading southwest, cloak wrapped tight around, clinging to these categories, brothers and family like they had a meaning beyond whatever people gave them.

Sam has only been with women before but he is no stranger to desire between men; has felt it, even before he met Dean, and has seen the fumbling manual version of it, between the boys of the Richmond orphanage where he slept on those occasions he was too young for the fight. And he has read of it, the soaring old legends and the wildword poets and the grave prohibitions and the chronicles of murdered kings.

Dean was willing, before his name was discovered, and what did that mean. What did that say about his history. What's law to an outlaw? What's sin to a sodomite, he could call at Dean's back, drive it deep as an arrow.

It's not the act that stops Dean but Sam himself. It's Sam that's the problem, and his fingers clench around his reins and he sees himself as in a mirror, as though he were standing alongside: a degenerate, a scarecrow, irredeemable. As his father might see him. A son begging a son for a fuck. Was his greed so boundless? Were there no depths he wasn't willing to sink to?

Such were the dreams Azazel and Masters held for him.

Sam sways in the saddle, light-headed, nauseous. He's sweating, and he rubs his face dry against his sleeve, breaks Sonny into a jog to catch up. Dean nods at him without looking.

“Give it time, Sam,” he says, quiet, after a moment. “I know it's been tough on you. I know.”

“No,” Sam says, and his throat constricts too much to continue. It's everything else that's tough. You're easy.

Dean flicks him a glance but doesn't press it, and they take the valley road as being less travelled, dew shining still in the shadows. Swallows dive and swing across their feet and then disappear with a spit and flash of alarm. Sam searches the sky and sees why.

“Duck hawk,” he says as she banks across the field, searching for less alert prey. The wanderer.

He looks down and Dean is staring at him. 

“Fool,” he says, warm, and sighs heavily. “All right, Señor Peregrine, where are we going? Away from disaster ain't much of a direction.”

“Well,” Sam says, and buries a sudden desire to say anywhere that doesn't mean anything. “I guess it's Texas and see what else they found on Masters.”

Dean looks away over the field a moment and Sam wonders if he's thinking the same, that maybe it would be nice to have no place specific to go to, could just chase their fancies, the sun; could follow a river to its source or mouth, could say the whitest beach in Mexico or the coldest pebble in the deepest canyon or the tallest redwood that's ever spied the ocean and have that be their only obligation.

“Onwards and upwards, ladies,” Dean says, and clicks at his girl, and heads on up the trail.

::

Cold Oak had been bad. Close to the worst thing that had ever happened to Sam.

Those kids had died, strangers he felt he somehow knew.

One had gasped his own name up at Sam, life's blood seeping into the mud, and still trying to form a connection. Andy. The reason Sam was still alive.

The smallest and frailest of them all, the girl Ava, had been the fastest and first to react, had seen the inevitability of the situation; had been ready, prepared, and willing. She killed with little effort, first the three others in the pen, and then, as Masters laughed, one by one the men with the guns. Andy had tried to use fire to make them flee, and all the while had hidden Sam from her sight until he died.

It was too late for her. The gunmen outside the pen had already begun to burn when he stepped up behind.

He'd never killed a human with his bare hands before. Masters had grinned at him, teeth flickering white and pleased, when Ava dropped to the ground.

“We always wanted it to be you, Samuel,” she'd said, and lifted by the growing growling flames, blood on his hands and buoyant with his knowledge stretching out to grasp things that had once been hidden from him, and this woman-creature's admiration—Sam had felt pride.

He never wants to feel so righteous again.

He had crashed back down and fixed himself on her murder. He had stepped through flame and smoke and found her gone, fled, and himself weak and insufficient. Still he had chased her into the dark, and nearly gotten himself killed, and two other women.

So Cold Oak had been bad, and Eldorado too, bad in a way that took all his deepest and most unutterable hopes and drowned them without hesitation or mercy, and the closer they get to Texas the more he feels that fate itching again, waking inside him.

But then, of course, there had been Dean.

::

Someone in the front bar has been playing the fiddle for three hours now, and the noise slices through to Sam even as he hides in the back room. What started out as dancing figures has tumbled and slurred into _Bastard's Lament_ and some other mournful waltz that the man crooning by the bar knows three and a half words to, and doesn't care to put in their right position.

Dean has left him to it. His girl had thrown a shoe during a creek crossing three days ago and she'd pulled up with a warm fetlock at the end of every day since. Dean had fretted nonstop until they found this ugly miserable hamlet, its dank buildings, the wind sinking down the hill and pushing chimney smoke into the street. Dean had insisted on a full day of rest even after she was reshod and the inaction has taken Sam's mood to a place dark and unforgiving. 

“There goes my baby,” warbles his night's entertainment, and the woman next to him sniffs loudly, lifts her skirts to her eyes. If Sam stood next to them he could take his knife and slot it under the man's chin, or by his balls, the place that cowers men the most. He could say, give me some peace, for God's sake. My head hurts.

He has started dreaming again.

Not visions; not even that bare scrap of usefulness. They have ceased entirely. Just the old miasma of failure and portent. John Winchester and Yelloweyes. And this morning he had woken chasing the phantom warmth of his brother, who lay in a bed not six feet away. It was as much as much a torment as the others and even more unshakeable, and he is alone to try to shake it, no one in this room he would even pay for help. 

He buys a bottle at the bar, more than what their beds cost, nods at the singer, and relocates to a seat on the porch, a vestigial affair abutting the alley. It's freezing and lightless, but it feels safer, just him and the stars and the frigid wind. 

It was a night like this that Sam had left his father. How certain he'd been: to go to the city and become a free man, a doctor, someone who could save. The demon was dead two years now. The crusade was over. Why scavenge these other death-trap escapades.

“Wilfully blind,” his father had said, white-faced, furious beyond anything Sam had seen before. “They ain't done with you and you know it.”

“What left is there to do to me,” Sam spat, embracing the end, throwing his bag over his shoulder. “I have you as a father.”

“No more,” he'd growled, and there had been fright in it too, dire portent, and Sam had seen it and ignored it, and paid the price. “Don't think if you leave that next we meet, it will be as father and son.”

He'd been wrong there. Sam had seen him once more, and done a son's duty: dug him up and burned him in his pine box and said his prayers.

“What in God's name are you doing? It's cold as a welldigger's ass out here.”

Dean swims out of the dark, eidolic. Sam's not even sure if he's real. He stands, leans on the rail anyway, welcomes his ghosts, and then Dean reaches him, standing a foot lower, frowning.

“What's wrong?”

Nothing, Sam tries to say, and finds that his voice doesn't want to work. He coughs, takes a drink, lets it burn him into the present moment. “Nothing's wrong. How is she?”

“Sound. We'll go tomorrow.” He hesitates, and reaches up, and Sam flinches away, stands straight and tries to ignore the hurt in Dean's face. He holds out the bottle like that was what Dean was asking for and is filled with a yearning to be far away, back in Boston, playing at a safe world like boys.

“Dean,” he says, and Dean has turned his head away towards the street but he makes a quiet answering noise, drinks from the bottle and licks his lips, waiting. “What did you think the first time you saw Masters?”

Dean considers the ground; speaks carefully.

“I thought, here is a creature I have never seen before.”

“You knew she was evil.”

“Yes, underneath. I tried to make it...” Dean frowns. “Normal.”

“Rational.”

“Yes.”

“Would you know it again? Would you listen? Would you see?”

Dean looks at him direct then, head cocked and hard-eyed.

“Yes.”

“I'll take that as a promise, brother.”

“You take it how you like, Sam,” Dean says, irritated now, curling his free hand into a fist, working himself up. “You always do. You fucker, you goddamn closemouthed fucker, lurking in the cold feeling sorry for yourself. Get a better hobby, for Christ's sake. You make me wanna—”

He breaks off, cheeks red, too overcome for words, muscle jumping in his jaw. He shakes his head and Sam grins at him.

“Wanna what?”

Dean glares more, head still shaking, trying to close his mouth around an answering smile.

“I'll slap the sorry right out of you.”

Sam tips his head back and laughs.

“You'll try.”

“I won't even break a sweat,” Dean says, and swings himself up over the rail and onto the porch in one long easy move, single-handed, the bottle still held around the neck, and Sam puts his fists up, rises on the balls of his feet, joking a feint. Dean mirrors him and Sam can see where this will go, getting his hands on his brother again, getting his blood up, and a rare sense of self-preservation wakes him, relaxes him back into standing easy. He claps Dean's shoulder.

“I can't help but make you mad, can I?”

“I don't even know a word for what you make me,” Dean says, a joke that comes out strange, and he drinks, turned away from Sam again, hiding himself, always hiding himself and he calls Sam the closemouthed one.

“It is cold, you're right,” Sam says, and elbows him. “Though I'm not so familiar with a welldigger's ass,” and Dean's smile flickers back into life, and he snorts, hands the bottle over.

“Come on, Thunderhead,” he says, and Sam rolls his eyes, and they head on through, past the warbler and his woman, the bartender, the man asleep in the corner, the dog, the fire, the sweeper, through the rear door to the rooms, leaving the fiddler behind and all of humanity.

::

The Great Valley carries them south, floats them like a raft and then turns under their feet and dunks them, downpour then drizzle, melting snow and fog and frost until their leather is swollen and their furs stink and every crease in their skin could grow moss. They break into a shed to overnight amongst the ploughs and blades and in the morning, snow turning back into showers, Sam sees the exhaustion clear on Dean's face, swinging back up into the saddle. Everything is mud and slush and cloud. The sun is so low that when it does emerge it's always in their eyes.

It's Sam's idea to give up the anonymity of the foothills and cut through towards Carlisle and a real bed, and evening sees them trudging weary up the wide streets of one of the outlying villages, pretty and clean enough that Sam supposes it's one of those places where the East Coast rich come with their children and their mistresses and their titans-of-industry friends. He knows even as they hitch up outside that the Bright Star Inn is too rich for them, but he is at the end of his rope and the sign shows vacancy, so they throw rugs over the horses and head inside, puddles under their coats where they hang them in the hall. 

Sam stands dripping at the desk, waiting to pay for a room. Dean is sagged into a chair by the fire, hands hovering in front of the flames, the first warm light Sam has seen in an eternity, burnishing him up him soft and alive. He looks ten years younger.

“We ain't got no rooms.”

Sam turns, startled.

“What?”

The clerk smoothes his moustache, looks long at Dean, back at Sam.

“Take your pretty boy and scram, kid, we ain't got no rooms.” 

It's not that way, Sam could say, and be outraged. Or, take down your sign, feigning ignorance of his meaning. Or, aiming for pity, don't you know it's the Flood out there? 

He stares long at the clerk and the man fidgets, and all that Sam doesn't say stays in him and rots down into black poison.

“They've got no rooms, Dean,” he calls, loud, still fixed forward, and hears Dean sigh and get sore and slow to his feet, and when he looks over his shoulder, Dean has his hands so casual on his hips with his guns showing.

“Now—” the clerk warns, and his shoulder drops, reaching towards whatever he's stashed underneath the counter.

“I can't sleep on these sissy beds anyways,” says Dean, and grabs his coat, heads back out to his girl.

“Tell me another place,” Sam says, even and cold. The clerk sniffs.

“You'll find yourself a comfy puddle out by—”

“Tell me another place,” Sam says, feeling his vision go dark, and the clerk pales, and names a name, and a street, and the right and left turns.

“If I can't find it,” Sam says, ground down, “I know where to find you, at least.”

“It's there,” the clerk spits, and grins. “And I guarantee they got a room free for you, darlin.”

::

Sam frowns seeing the hotel: it's imposing in that bullish obdurate turn of the century style, red brick dark as mud, planted well-back from the street. The timber of the eaves and shutters is peeling and the garden is shabby but it's purpose-built, maybe ten rooms, a plaque by the door proudly listing notable guests, and he wouldn't have figured it as a place the clerk would punish him with.

Running in from a back room is a woman who lights up to see them, and she takes their names and their two dollars with an ill-disguised eagerness. It's a cheap rate, and Sam remarks on it.

“Oh, winter,” she says, with a careless air, smoothing her hands on the bright check of her dress. It's hardly an answer.

“But all is well?” Sam asks.

“Oh, yes! Oh, you've heard, no, you're very safe,” she says, and hands them each a key.

“Thank you, ma'am, that's reassuring,” Dean says, grave.

They might be the only occupants. They get one of the best rooms at any rate, overlooking the sodden street, large and queerly decorated. On one wall is pinned a wedding dress, lace train spread out like a curtain. On the other is a modern portrait of a dark and serious man, a close relative of the owner, similarity in their jawlines, their small deep-set eyes. He is carefully rendered, an intimate friend perhaps of the painter.

“No heating,” Dean grumbles, surveying, and shrugs off his cloak with a sigh, sets to poking the fireplace. “No wonder they got a population problem.”

“I'll find some fuel,” Sam says, shaking off the urge to turn the portrait around, and heads down to the courtyard and the woodpile; checks on the horses and gets to chatting with the hand. 

He returns to Dean with his arms full of coal and tinder and his pocket full of whiskey enough to last them the night. He hands it all over and unburdens himself of his own hat and cloak, his knives; sits on the bed and watches Dean mutter his way through the building of the fire.

“What's got you smiling?” Dean grouses. “You failed to drown me. You'll have to try something else.”

“I know a man who hopes for us to be murdered in these beds.”

Dean blinks at him.

“Sam,” he says, patient, and leans on the poker like a cane. “If you could be less of a mystery on occasion I would take that as a kindness.”

Sam's grin widens.

“What do you remember about poltergeists, brother.”

::

Most of the disturbances—roving furniture and trinkets, creaking boards, sobbing, and then the three deaths—were noted on the third floor, by staff who never kept on more than a few months. Dean commandeers himself into charming the woman at the desk, partially for information, mostly as a distraction, and Sam arms himself with a salt gun and a lamp and starts looking.

From what the stablehand said, the men who died were all travellers, no one noteworthy, no friends in town. There are seven rooms arranged around the landing, all empty. The northern corner-room features a rug covering a scrubbed-at bloodstain that likely didn't make it into the guidebooks, but aside from that there's not much he can see; less that he can sense.

In the attic, baking her back against the chimney brick, is a woman in a rocking chair. She is knitting, black wool like the shawl the owner downstairs wore. He has never been able to make old women feel grandmotherly towards him and this one, sitting here in the virtual dark, seems formidably bleak and eternal, iron-grey hair in a bun, her cheeks slack and deeply creased.

“Ma'am,” he says, turning his hat in his hands. She remains rocking in her chair, looking out the porthole window, fingers working. Her angle would let her see only clouds. As he comes around he sees her eyes are glazed, milky as the sky. “Ma'am? May I ask you a question?”

Her rocking slows, and the click of her needles. Her voice is dry as kindling.

“Boys do whatever they want these days.”

Sam crouches by her knee.

“There were deaths here.”

Her eyes narrow and dart to him. Her cataracts might be galaxies.

“That's a matter of numbers. This is an old hotel, boy. Old. You know John Calhoun slept here three nights. I was a girl.”

“But there's one death in particular, isn't there?”

She blinks at him and drifts sideways, fading.

“You sound like a strong young man,” she says. “Why don't you enlist? You ought to be ashamed.”

“Ma'am,” he says gently. “The war is over.”

She turns back to the window.

“I'm glad I only had daughters,” she croaks. “And had no one to send.”

Sam breathes out slowly through his nose and looks down at his hands, clasped tight enough that his knuckles are white, and tries again.

“I'm sorry to ask, but it's important.” 

“What is?”

“What happened here?”

Her needles start up again, and the wrinkles around her mouth shift into something like a smile.

“Oh, there's nothing to fear, child.”

Sam sighs again and stands, goes to leave and pauses at the top step.

“You had no sons?” The clacking stops, and when he looks she is sucking at her gums, and he knows that this is the right track. “The portrait in my room, who is he then?”

“No one,” she says, waspish.

“He's someone. He bears resemblance.”

“He fell away from God.”

“That makes him no one?”

“What is there without God?”

“But his portrait remains.”

“He was beautiful, wasn't he?” she muses, like she's talking of a landscape, another place, another person who walked through remarking on the roses. Sam feels shaky on his feet.

“What did you do?”

She falls silent, her lips drawing together, again, all crevasse and bitter secrets, and he turns to leave again with a swelling pressing grief in his chest, or anger, his breath coming short as the takes the stairs down, surprised that he can still be surprised by the lonely fate of any misfit son.

He opens the door to the landing and shocks the owner, coming up from the floor below. She glares at him, cold.

“Were you bothering Mother?”

She has a bruise on the side of her face, days old, spreading out from the point of her cheek, that he must not have noticed before; he doesn't understand how he'd missed it. He must be half out of his mind. Her right eye is still blooded, the white disappeared entirely.

“What happened here?” he asks, and she purses her lips in a perfect replica of the woman above, because there is no time that does not loop if one waits long enough, and there is no child on the face of God's earth who escapes their provenance.

::

He steps deep into the bottle while Dean's out, supposedly making love to the owner. There's a part of him that does it preemptively, protectively. He has turned his chair away from the portrait and still feels his eyes, a remote man in three quarter profile, a black beard, black gaze out of the canvas that might have been stern, made soft. Someone had loved him and painted him well.

“ _Sisters_ , Sam. Twins,” Dean says, rich with amusement, appearing and stinking of whiskey and perfume, voluble in the good cheer he has found somewhere else, with someone else. “Two of them, I didn't even realise at first. Patience and Charity.” He chuckles, pokes the fire. “Jesus, it's cold. What are you doing sitting in here in the dark? They've both seen it. It caught Charity around the head with a saucepan. Some wool merchant, the first one who died over in the corner room. It all started after him. Nasty character apparently.”

Sam shakes his head. 

“Wrong,” he says, drawing out the vowel, twisting it around his tongue, barbed. “Stupid.”

“Wrong?” Dean says, still amused, turning up the wick, sagging down onto the bed.

Sam throws a hand over his shoulder, indicating the portrait. “He did it. Is doing it.”

“And you know how?”

Sam snorts.

“Look at him.”

A pause. The room turns some. There's more light, Dean coming in here, chasing away the dark. Sam puts up his arm to shield himself. Sometimes a man just needs to hide, for the love of Christ.

Dean is standing over him, his silhouette glowing. He bends down and hooks a hand in Sam's hair. No more humour. His voice is low and so kind it makes Sam ache.

“One day you're going to tell me this thing that has you so twisted up inside and you'll see that I don't care.”

“Dean.”

“You'll see.”

“You already know—”

“I ain't talking about that and you know it,” Dean says, and how he can do it, how he can separate it Sam doesn't know, it's too messy, tangled black and old and gnarled, it is all one and the same, surely.

“You think you can keep me clean,” he says, and by the dismay in Dean's eyes knows he is right, this brothers business he swears by only ancillary to his true thinking. “You think you can save me.”

“I just want to—”

“You're too _late_ , Dean. Don't you get it? I'm not. Clean.” Sam swallows, and brings up a hand to hang off his forearm, for balance. “I never have been. Never will be.”

“You—”

“So you can do whatever you, you want, to me.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Dean gasps, horrified, and looks ill. “Sam, tell me. Just _tell_ me.”

Sam shakes his head, too addled to find the words. Dean's hand is hot curved around the back of his skull. He must have been there, Sam realises. In the cottage in Lawrence. He must have been there and escaped unsullied. He had never, of course, featured in the story.

“There was a man,” Sam says, his stomach turning. His head lolls and Dean holds him up. “The happiest in the world. And he went to say goodnight to his baby, and another man was there, standing over the crib. He was feeding the baby. From his vein. He had yellow eyes. And the man's wife was on fire.”

Dean's fingers dig painfully into the back of his skull.

“Then you were just an infant,” he says, earnest, not getting it. Sam shudders and tries to get to his feet and Dean keeps him down, seated, his knees weak and disobedient. “Whatever happened, it's not your fault.”

“Fault. Fault doesn't change things. It was unholy. It _is_ unholy.”

“No, Sam,” Dean shakes his head, and then tugs on Sam's hair, shakes him too. Everything blurs, smears, ink under a careless hand. “Hey, wake up. Listen to me Sam. I don't care.”

Sam blinks and Dean is there still. Sam can see every clear and perfect line of him, every eyelash, the ripple of colour in his irises. He is so certain.

“Dean, you have to promise me.”

“It's just blood, Sam. It doesn't mean anything about you.”

“Don't be so—Dean. You were there. You've seen evil.”

Dean makes a face, perplexed.

“You're talking about Cold Oak?”

“No, that's past, I'm—what's in me, you have to—my father is dead, there's no one else.”

Dean recoils. 

“Stop that.”

“There'll be a time—“

“No.”

“You'll need to do what's right.”

“No, Sam.”

“You promised,” Sam begs, and Dean shakes his head, no no no. “You promised, brother, please.”

Dean tugs him in, brushes his lips against Sam's forehead, and Sam grabs at his face, tries to pull him down.

“That ain't gonna happen,” Dean whispers to him, and Sam would ask what, what won't, which won't, can't you see it's as sure as the sun, but Dean picks him up and tumbles him into bed, and douses the lamp, and Sam disappears with it.

::

He wakes to a creaking noise, the floor flexing as the day warms and the fire rises and his brother stomps about indiscriminate and rude. He groans; jumps for the nearest thing to hand, the coal bucket, which doesn't help any to keep his stomach down.

“Pitiful,” Dean says, from over by the washstand. Sam tries to say fuck you and can't form the words. He has bile in his nose. His tongue is wool, his head at the mercy of an ice pick. Dean tosses him a flask that clatters into his knee and he takes a drink, rinses his mouth, wipes his face on the bedsheet. “Don't spit out my whiskey you Philistine. I've been up hours. I solved this whole thing.”

“Acta est fabula plaudite,” Sam grunts, flipping him the bird. He pulls the pail closer, glad his father is not here to see him. Lord, the lecture he'd have had. Drinking like that is for the weeks in between jobs.

“Actor ex your face,” Dean says, wrinkling his nose. “These men that died. Let's just say the ladies of the house had a dim view of their morals.”

That old crone had a dim view of just about everybody, Sam was willing to bet.

“So what next?” Dean says.

“Purification.” 

“How?”

“Fuck,” Sam groans. “I don't know. You got Van Van oil on you?”

“I suppose I can check my other jacket.”

“Exactly.” Sam pushes the bucket away, leans back against the bed and crosses his hands over his head to dim the light, block his ears. The shutters are rattling against their hooks; another bleak winter day, the wind a high piercing whistle.

“Well what else do you do with a poltergeist?”

“You find out where he's buried and hope the ground's not too frozen.”

“Oh, wonderful,” says Dean, light, and his false jollity is worse than the coal stink, the shutters, the creaking, the nausea wrenching Sam's guts around. 

Sam remembers. Curled up here on the floor with the bed frame digging into his spine and Dean banging their bags around, and last night he'd told the truth of himself, he'd broken the one everlasting proscription and maybe Dean was still here but how long would that last, how long until he made his graceful exit, well met and good luck in the field of demons, this has been profanity enough for a lifetime.

“Sam,” Dean says, so quiet, and sighs, and a wild denial spirals up Sam's chest, springs tears into his eyes.

“No,” he gasps, and the bed moves behind him, wrenches a foot along the wall and knocks him forward and he thinks for a moment that he's done it himself, and Dean shouts in alarm and the door slams open and two women stand in it, mirrored.

“Stop this racket,” snaps Patience, or Charity.

“Your brother,” Sam says, and staggers to his feet. “Where is he buried?”

“You think we'd give him a Christian burial?” says Charity, or Patience, and yelps as one of Sam's boots flies hard at her, cowers and takes the blow on her shoulder instead of her head.

“The portrait, Dean,” Sam shouts, hoarse over the banging of the shutters, and the blanket flaps off the bed, envelops him and flings him against the wall. He hits with his back and his head and crumples on the ground, agony, wrapped thickly, his sight baffled, trying to suck air through the wool into his stunned lungs, losing his direction and which way was up, arms trapped against his chest and something screeches, someone: so piercing it takes him a moment to realise it's not inside his skull.

“Mother!” cries one of the women, and it seems the whole room shakes and the ground leaves his body and batters him again, his vision exploding white.

Hands on him, tugging, turning, ripping, and Dean crying his name, clearing his face as the fire blazes, catching the portrait, half-wedged in there.

“ _Sam_ , hey, Sam,” chanting, shaking him as the blanket relaxes, “Hey, are you hurt?”

Sam heaves in a breath and blinks at the devouring flame and their disordered room, chaos, tumbled chairs and clothes and the washstand knocked over entirely, jugs smashed and water spreading. They are alone, and he is on his back, and Dean is kneeling by him.

“Yes,” Sam moans, and tries to pull in another deep breath and coughs, racking and sore, and that sets his whole body clamouring. He is nothing but hurt. “Severely.”

Dean grins, relief, leans back and wipes a hand over his face, and blows out a breath.

“Goddamn, kid. You looked like a salted slug. That was the stupidest thing I've ever seen.”

“Fuck off,” he coughs, and to his chagrin Dean does just that, digs his fingers into Sam's shoulder and then releases him, stands and nudges the portrait into the fire with his foot. There's no point, Sam could say; the eyes are gone, it's over. Maybe the woman in the attic is dead, maybe not, but there's no more threat coming from that man.

“You gonna just lie there all day, slug?”

“Yes. Maybe forever.” Sam rolls onto his side and considers the merits of curling into a ball. He puts his hand up to block the window.

“Absolutely pitiful.”

“Will you let a man expire without pestering him about it,” Sam complains, and Dean shakes his head, starts kicking the shards of ceramic into the corner.

“Hangover won't kill you, you oughta know that. You need to get some food into you.”

“Ugh.”

“I saw some fish guts downstairs. And—” Dean sniffs the air. “Is that rancid pork fat?”

Sam groans again.

“I'm never eating again,” he says. “And I hate you.”

“Ah,” Dean says, and sends him a sly look from the corner of his eye, and smiles. “Give it half an hour, brother.”

Gratitude wells insistent in Sam, presses behind his eyes. Brother. He knows, and calls him brother still. It's beyond anything that Sam deserves; beyond anything he has ever expected or earned for himself, to have Dean be willing to stay. 

He holds out a hand to Sam, and Sam takes it, and together they pull him to his feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [works referenced, translations.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/162938264051/peregrine-chapter-2-bristol-over-the-hudson)


	3. Near Burnsville - The Piney Woods - Homer

Sam dies on a minor unnamed slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains, on the twelfth of March, 1881.

Not that he knows at the time. He recalls forging his way off the trail, under trees groaning with the weight of snow, past the foundered broken horse of Margaret Masters. He had pressed what he thought was his advantage, heedless of Dean calling him far behind, heedless of the storm coming in. He remembers her face, closer than he could bear, pretty and vicious, and Dean had to be a hundred yards away. He had thrown his father's knife, and she had grabbed it out of the air, soared up to him and pulled him out the saddle, held his jaw to pull him back against her body, hard and strong. Her whisper in one ear and Dean's cry in the other, he and his girl bounding up towards them through the snow.

That's all he remembers. He is told the rest later.

::

He wakes in a trapper's cabin, fully dressed, laid out atop an ancient balding bearskin coat. He is freezing, so chilled he is past shaking. By his stubble he hasn't been out so long. It's near dark and snowing. Why he isn't under the covers he has no idea, and why there is no fire, and no brother.

It hurts to move. He pulls on his knit cap lopsided and wraps himself in the hide. The ashes are fresh, but cold, when he sifts them through his numb fingers, and he brushes spiders from the kindling and breaks three matches before he can get one to catch. He throws logs on until it's blazing, too big for the fireplace, sending smoke into the room, making him cough, deep, his back spiking in pain, his head cracking. 

Sonny is alone, rugged-up in a lean-to out back, and Sam's too frozen to contemplate where that places Dean. It's half an hour before he's together enough to melt snow to make tea, as his body wakes and his teeth begin to chatter and the shaking starts up, and his brain starts turning on something other than pain and survival.

They hadn't found Masters through any skill of their own. Dean had wanted a drink, and they'd found a village on the Catawba busy enough not to notice a new face, and a bar dirty and unfriendly enough not to care for their names, and then they'd found a dim corner even in that. 

Dean had been trying to guess what Sam was whittling, sillier as the whiskey eased them: a whalebone; a spectre; a stick; my nose. Sam put it away in his pocket, laughing, swearing he would never say, feeling his cheeks heat; never any good at whittling, and apparently, especially not good at whittling a black devil horse, and a woman had sat by Sam and said admiringly, 

“Ain't you boys a pair of handsome jacks and no mistake, and I am hoping y'all are also mannered enough to look after a lady.”

Sam had looked at her round face with its red smile, Dean's pleased low chuckle ringing warm, and he hadn't known. She'd drunk with them for an hour; she had put her thigh over Sam's, and made a suggestion, and grinned with her eyelids lowered at his blush, and when Sam looked to his brother for help Dean had shrugged and said, you got the money, and there was something in his eyes, some heat that got Sam standing, all three of them, a bed, and his mind was racing when she stumbled and fell into Dean, her white fingers sliding against his lapel. 

As she stepped away Dean had spun her by the shoulder and backhanded her so hard she hit the ground and bounced, her skirts an explosion, and his gun dropped from her hand. 

“Masters,” Dean growled, and she had laughed a high ringing note of hate, pushing up off the floor, and fled, left them to fight their way out of there, fists and chairs and Dean leaving a man maybe dead because Sam was still stunned, unable to recoup. 

But he found her, and tracked her, pulling Dean after him, no care for Dean's qualms; had chased her dark hair and the taunting back of her day coat two days up over the mountains until she turned and smiled at him, unfrozen, uncaring, and pulled him close.

::

The door slams open, night outside and the snow whirling in. Sam looks up from his mug and the fire and his black miseries of abandonment and failure. The flames stay in his eyes, too bright to see who's standing there at first, and he's so tired that maybe he doesn't even care if it's a friend.

It is, of course, Dean, shadows flicking across his face. He seems frozen himself.

“Shut the door,” Sam snaps, all his hard-won heat flying, and Dean turns, mechanical, shoves the door closed against the force of the wind. “Where the hell have you been?” 

Sam glares at him and Dean shakes his head, eyes wide, guilty look on his face. He oughta be guilty. “I nearly froze to death. Where did you go?”

“I—I went looking for game.”

“With what, your bare hands?”

“I...” Dean trails off, staring at him.

“And?”

“No, none, nothing.”

“Good job, brother, well done,” Sam gripes, and Dean looks so stricken, so haggard with exhaustion and effort that he feels immediately ashamed. He stands and pulls him closer to the fire. His beard has snow in it, even his eyelashes; Sam tugs his gloves off and gives him the mug to hold, removes his outer layers and shakes the snow off in the corner.

“You idiot, Dean, going out in this weather. You could have killed yourself. We'll make it, we have that rabbit, we have corn, we have water. The storm won't take long to blow over.”

“Sam,” Dean says, unhearing, a strange held caution in his voice. “What do you remember?”

Sam drapes his coats over the table and tries to keep his face steady.

“She got away, didn't she?”

Dean looks down at the mug, seems to realise what it's for. He drinks, and shakes his head.

“I killed her.”

“You what?”

“I killed her.”

Sam feels his jaw drop.

“How?”

“With your knife. She's dead.” 

Sam sags onto his chair.

“I don't understand. You were fifty yards away if you were a foot.”

“Hey, who are you talking to,” Dean says, veneer of scorn and something else trembling underneath, the shock of her death maybe; it's buzzing in Sam's head too, the magnitude: after all this time, after all she'd done. To have seen her, fought her poison again, and have her punished for it.

“Good,” he whispers, and thinks, on a great upswell of displaced sorrow: _Jessica_. “Good,” he says, stronger, and looks up at Dean, and feels a smile grow in him. “Thank you.”

“You—” Dean falters and Sam raises his eyebrow, waiting. “How are you feeling?”

Sam lets the smile out, and Dean smiles back, weak and cold, but she's dead, Dean killed her. Yelloweyes and his daughter, both dead by Winchester hands. How he wishes his father were here, to know that Dean could do this, could finish the job they'd started. 

How proud he would have been.

“Sam,” Dean says, and Sam snaps back to him. “How are you feeling?”

“Cold.” He shrugs. “Sore. I'll be fine, had worse.”

“Cold?”

“Getting better,” Sam says, and nods at the fire. Dean stares into it and Sam stares at him. The chase Sam took them on, battering their way uphill, unrelenting, has taken its toll, carved age into his cheeks. His eyes are red-rimmed, his beard growing unkempt in pale skin. He looks like a stranger.

“Yeah,” Dean says, eventually. “You took a beating.”

“I feel like it,” Sam says, wry, and hooks the other chair from the table, pushes it Dean. “It was bad?”

“It was—” Dean swallows, stays standing and looks at him, careful. His colouring suggests yes, bad enough that Sam is glad he doesn't remember. “I was kinda worried for a minute there.”

“Sorry,” he offers, not knowing what else to do with the unsure look on Dean's face. “Thank you.” 

Dean shakes his head. 

“No, I—you're really feeling all right?”

“Fit as a fiddle, Dean,” Sam says, and drops the pelt, stands and spreads his arms, tries not to shiver at the shock of air. “See?”

Dean reaches a tentative arm and turns him around, lifts his shirt to see his back. Sam keeps turning, flaps his elbows, hops a little from one foot to the other.

“See? I'd dance for you but my clogs are in my other valise.”

“Shut up,” Dean says, relief and warmth finally, that tentative sound going from his voice, gives Sam a true grin, and Sam grins back. “Shut up, you fool, goddamn,” and reels him close for a hug. Sam wraps his arms around, surprised but glad to be close, to hold his strength. He hides his smile in Dean's shoulder.

“You did it, Dean. You got her.”

“Is that... Is that gonna be the end of it? The demon stuff?”

Sam draws in a breath and steps back. “Dean.”

“I'm hungry,” Dean says, quickly, and Sam rolls his eyes.

“You leave us any of that rabbit?” he asks. Dean smiles. 

“There's plenty left,” he says, and as Sam moves Dean snaps a hand out and stops him, pushes him back towards the fire. “Stay there. I'll put my girl away, I won't be long. Get warm.”

“You get warm, you were just out there,” Sam says, and there is a stupid, weak struggle while they both try to be the first to leave the fire. 

“Fuck's sake.” Dean glares at him, faux anger. “You, water, me food.”

Sam laughs, lit up brighter inside than he's been since he woke, and they shoulder each other, jostling to the door, Sam for snow and Dean towards his girl, patient outside the door, her back to the wind. 

They hunch by the fire together, drinking spiked tea, waiting on the broil. Dean watches Sam like a hawk until he finishes his first biscuit, scattering crumbs all down his front.

“Thanks, Dean,” he says, swiping at himself, drooping and sore, exhaustion overtaking him even with his stomach clamouring at the smell of meat frying, and Dean's eyes crease kindly at him over his mug. It's a while before he answers.

“Any time, brother.”

::

In the morning Dean leads them back to the road and they take the pass over the next ridge. He stops them early, as soon as he finds a likely homesteader to charm, not even fifteen miles and Sam wouldn't say out loud that he was grateful but he's still achy and glad to overnight in the relative comfort of a barn, the wind coming up again and the creeks dangerous with meltwater. The mother of the house sneaks Dean a loaf wrapped in cloth and a hunk of cheese.

“Thank you, ma'am,” Dean says. She blushes, twenty years their senior and just a plain honest workworn woman as far as Sam can see but Dean smiles at her with a speculative look in his eye that terrifies Sam, watching from the aisle where he's combing out Sonny's tail. He turns away and glares at their kid's pony taking up a whole stall and waits for the rise and drop in wind to signify her exit.

They eat up in the loft, pass the remaining afternoon with inventory and weapons. Dean lays a blanket over a bale of hay and spreads their guns out, and Sam empties their packs. They are in dire need of ammunition, and the sewing kit is somehow lacking needles, and Dean's vest has a hole in the breast pocket and Sam's union suit might even be beyond repair. And something else is missing.

“Where's the knife?”

“Hmm?” Dean is checking his holsters, spinning his colts, three revolutions, four, backwards and forwards and then reset. Sam watches, mesmerised. He has the smoothest action Sam's ever seen. Their father had sworn by the crossdraw but Dean would have beaten him, Sam is certain. “What knife?”

“My father's knife, Dean. Where is it?”

“I don't have it. It's not in here?” Dean glances at their gear spread out and Sam shakes his head. “I must have lost it on the mountain.”

“What?” Sam can't breathe. “On the mountain? How?”

Dean frowns at him and reholsters, takes off his gunbelt and lays it carefully on the blanket. He picks up Sam's sawed-off and checks the chambers.

“I was—there was a lot happening, Sam.”

Sam groans and puts his head in his hands.

“We have to go back.”

He can hear Dean startle, alarm in his voice.

“No.”

“We need it.”

“We'll do without it,” Dean says, sighting through the barrels, like it was any old thing, that had belonged to any old man. He doesn't get it. He just doesn't get it. 

“That's my father's knife, Dean. And it's the only sure thing we have against demons.”

“See reason,” Dean says. He keeps his face averted, so he knows he's in the wrong. “We just missed the blizzard. We'll never find the spot again. It's a grave.”

“ _You_ see reason,” Sam snaps. “We need it.”

Dean looks at him, bewildered.

“Sam, you're barely unfrozen, you'll—you'll die up there, what, what would I—”

“I'll be _fine_ ,” Sam says, trying for patience. Dean's face hardens.

“Maybe so, but you go back up there and I'll have to follow, and I can't guarantee I'll be fine. You wanna carry my body back down?”

Sam pauses. Dean, thrown deadweight over his own saddle, limbs dangling. The image is horrendous.

“No.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Dean says, sour to the point of curdling. “It ain't happening. Let it go.” He closes the shotgun with quick angry fingers, sets it down and stands. “I'm taking a walk.”

It's below freezing out there, Sam barely stops himself saying, cringing at the hypocrisy, and then Dean's down the ladder and he is alone, plagued with thoughts of Dean heading across to the house, taking tea and cake at that warm table inside, the mother hovering, the father with his big calloused hand on his shoulder. The girl staring in wonder. It turns Sam's stomach. 

He repacks their bags and Dean doesn't reappear. He makes his bed on straw, alone. He doesn't expect to be able to sleep, but he lies down and sees his father again, clear and grave in the deep black night and the ground tilts under him, a plunging feeling in his chest at having to account for this latest mistake, the lost knife, after everything his father went through to get it. The sacrifices he'd made. 

Sam turns and runs. He runs for twenty two years. It takes all night.

Raising dust in a summer wallow on the Plains. Ducking through the hoary orchards of Burkittsville. Scattering herons in the marsh where Caleb was murdered, the water thick, his boots sucked right off. The salt flats in high Utah, tracking blood across the shimmering winking crystals, his feet ribbons, his hands dripping that bright fresh healthy red. It might be his. He's not sure. He doesn't know any more what his own blood looks like. 

Up ahead his fathers and Dean are waiting in the lee of the mountain, heads bent together in conference. His fathers raise their many hands and Dean clasps them in a firm handshake. All is smiles.

Dean is in danger.

Sam's legs are too heavy; his lungs burn; his back howls; his mind clouds. As he runs to them they recede, and calling brings him nothing, and his desire, his need, all that animates him, so strong it might reach through the air and pick his brother up like a puppet, like the force in him that threw Dean away from Walker's bullet so long ago: that too is impotent. There is no level of strain or effort that will satisfy.

But he _wants_ , with a banked-up whole lifetime of unfulfilled want, he wants with a voracious grasping hunger and this might be—if he looks closely this reaching in vain for his disappearing brother might be pain beyond his capacity to bear and with the last spark of his self-preservation he forces his gaze aside, blinds himself and lets himself fall, and the sharded glassy ground is welcome by comparison.

He opens his eyes and Dean is there, propped up against a bale, blanket around his shoulders, turning his head like he'd been watching and didn't want to be caught in it, sitting up in vigil. Pensive and remote and the parts of him that are still a mystery are sharp enough to crucify Sam, still saturated in that fervid longing. It surprises him that he isn't reaching out somehow, is instead curled around himself, his cheek on his hand.

“Did you sleep?” he murmurs, voice rusty.

“No,” Dean says, and shrugs, uncomfortable, like he hadn't meant to say it. “Did you?”

Sam yawns and scrubs at his face, pushes himself upright and tries to flatten his hair, picks straw out of it. Pigeons coo in the rafters.

“First,” he says, “coffee. Then, shave. Then, let's get the fuck out of these mountains.”

Dean grins at him wide and white through the dawn-clear air, dust motes and animal smell and like that he's young again and present, without care, just about the most beautiful thing Sam has ever seen.

::

They kick on down to the valley where Tennessee turns the mountains into grass. Lengthening spring days and a waning moon, and they don't press speed, content to amble. In Newport Dean scribbles _Masters DEAD see you in May Old Man_ on the back of a penny postcard and throws it in the post to Bobby Singer.

“Still Texas then?” Sam says, tries to keep his voice light, and Dean turns his face up to the sun, basking.

“Yeah,” he says. “This demon blood thing—”

“Jesus,” Sam blurts, he says it so casual, it makes Sam burn and freeze at the same time, exposed, his stomach clenching. Dean looks at him.

“It's time to figure it out. You won't get past it 'til you stop running from it.”

“If you think it can be gotten past then you still don't understand,” Sam says, cold, stung by the implication. Running was the only thing that had ever saved him.

“I understand enough, Sam,” he says, and smiles. “Let Bobby take a gander. You ain't the only genius in town.”

Sam shakes his head and figures it pointless to reply and equally pointless to protest. These are people that kill monsters, he could say, but Dean never really understood that; and Sam can take care of himself. Their violence doesn't worry him. And their opinion he cares for even less.

 _Dean_ doesn't care; Dean hadn't left him after learning. And with that, the opinions of the rest of them could hang.

::

Dean enjoys the ride, deep in good cheer now that they're on their way to what is apparently his favourite place in the world. He buys a new pair of boots and handsome star-stamped cheekpieces for his girl outside Albertville as they turn towards the sunset finally and set their sights on the river. On the other side it finally feels like spring, ploughs out in the fields, mulecarts on the roads. At night the pines resound with an ecstasy of waking cicadas and by day the crabapple and wisteria are so heavy in the air it feels like pushing through water.

“You know we got a tail,” Dean says, a couple of days into the woods. “Since the ferry.”

“It's a busy road,” Sam says, and Dean looks at him scornfully. “Yeah, I know. You think it's Henricksen.”

“Couldn't say. Masters got any friends left?”

Sam shrugs. “We haven't talked lately.”

Dean grins at him and nods at the trees.

“Cover's pretty good here.”

“Can't we wait for after lunch,” Sam complains, and Dean laughs at him, grabs at Sam's reins and Sam slides off and watches Dean kick on down the trail, making a ruckus and stepping in every soft patch of ground he can see. It's about as obvious a ploy as could be, but a tail's got a tail's job to do, and he comes by sure enough an hour later, ducking under branches, cursing softly. It's not Henricksen; it's a white man, a stranger, and Sam rises from his cover, tosses a knife to thwack into the tree by his head.

His horse shies, but he stays on, wrangling it around and groping for his gun.

“Hold up there,” Sam says, raising his sawed-off. “Why are you following us?”

“Following?” The man says, wary. His face hangs off his cheekbones, a wide mouth in a pale beard. “Simply going my own way.”

“Liar,” Sam says. “Get down. Off side, come on, don't try that. Keep your hands clear.”

“You have a suspicious mind, young man.”

“I've lived in the world. On the ground, get.”

The man is rugged up well and smells of a few days' ride. Sam has no idea how he knew to be waiting at the ferry if he was looking for them; or else he was an opportunist, but there'd been plenty of open road and untaken opportunity on the delta.

Dean ambles back onto the scene while Sam is disarming him. He tosses Dean the man's rifle and Dean checks it over, raises an impressed eyebrow.

“What are you hoping to accomplish, friend?”

His eyes are pale too, and he doesn't blink so often. The effect is unpleasant.

“Whitetail is what I'm hoping to accomplish. Your brother has a lot to learn about trust.”

“He knows enough,” Dean says, and lashes the man's hands behind him with his own rope, helps him back onto his horse. Sam takes his reins and they keep on, nose to tail, dappling under the trees.

“Bristol?” Dean says over his shoulder to Sam, eyeing the man. Sam doubts it, considering the brother line, but plays along.

“Maybe. Or St Louis. Maybe he's such a shitty deerhunter he needs bounties to eat.”

The man bares his teeth. “The righteous eat to the satisfying of their soul.”

“The wicked more so,” Sam says, and he turns his flat eyes on Sam, all his pretence dropping away. This man is a true hunter; he is here for them.

“Christo,” he says, and looks disappointed when nothing happens. Sam tilts his head and takes a guess.

“So,” he says. “You're the man riding with Gordon Walker.”

“Maybe I'm just here to rob you,” he says, and Sam shrugs, done with the games.

“We're all here for one reason or another,” he says, and turns back to the front. Dean seems rattled by the name, looking hard through the trees. He checks his guns.

“Maybe I'll take another turn around,” he says, low, and throws the man's reins to Sam. “Stay on the track.”

“Careful,” Sam nods, and Dean clicks at his girl, swings her round to duck through into the green, brushing vines aside, the carpet of needles muffling their passing.

Sam checks the road behind again. Clear, but he keeps his shotgun out.

“What's your name?”

“Where are you taking me?”

“You first.”

The man shrugs stiffly. “Kubrick.”

“Well, you're going nowhere you wouldn't be already going, considering you were following us. Where's Walker?”

Kubrick snarls at him.

“Oh,” he says, deep and relishing. “The reckoning you've got coming.”

Sam turns his face away. The track bends ahead, mossy and unused.

“Tell me something new, Mr Kubrick.”

They walk on in silence, the trees bearing down. Sam doesn't like how long Dean is taking.

“Wherever you go it won't be far enough,” Kubrick says, and his words fall dead in the thick air. “You think you can be saved?”

“Some say saving's just a matter of asking.”

“How convenient for them,” Kubrick says, rich with disgust. “Sheep. He is in your heart or He is not.”

Sam twists in his saddle.

“How do you know He's not in my heart?”

Kubrick narrows his eyes and lifts his chin, scornful.

“You think that's Him in there?”

“Who's to pick one where so many have trod?”

A woman's voice, amused. There are three of them on the track, twenty feet away. Two women on foot and a mounted man in uniform, all blackeyed and grinning, and it takes Sam a moment to comprehend, to believe his eyes. Never has he heard of so much evil in one place.

“Exorcizamus te,” he starts, a whisper before he finds his full voice, going for his knife automatically, the wrong one that lodges in her chest and does nothing at all; as he watches she pulls it out, and Sonny tosses his head and backs up, into Kubrick's horse, logjam as she runs straight for them, panic, and Kubrick falls, slams into ground and just barely rolls away from his horse's hooves. “Omnis immundus spiritus—”

The woman darts through and picks Kubrick up like he's featherweight. Kubrick is whispering something under his breath. 

“Oh no, lovely,” she says as she pulls his hair back and fits the knife to his neck. His lips freeze in a wince. His hands still tied behind his back, his head held and twisted down at the whim of this tiny woman. “Hold your tongue, Winchester. Or he loses his and the rest.”

Her friends laugh and step closer. They seem to be unarmed, but that doesn't mean much.

“Omnis satanica potestas—”

She snarls and slits Kubrick's throat, wide red mouth and his shocked eyes and Sam is deep enough in the exorcism now that the demon is bucking under her skin, the other two losing their grins, pushing forward as Sam chants and fights to keep Sonny in place, his ears flat against his head and his eyes rolling white.

“You think we want you,” spits the second woman, older, chin jutting, her grey hair wild escaping its bonnet, her body shaking so much it blurs until she regains control. She raises her voice to cry over Sam's. “You think we're all so eager to lick your fucking feet.”

He can feel the exorcism pulling on her, on all of them, clutching in the meat of their bodies to stay; they are all hatred, all glee, all survival, resisting him hard enough that he's having to shout the words, all of them boiling inside as they fight him and he fights back, drawing deep down past his fear. 

He starts to lose.

The old woman roars at him and his hold on her fractures, terror spiking, and as she steps towards him shots knock her back off balance, six blooming dead centre as Dean and his girl leap down out of the trees to their left, barrelling into the man's horse, throwing him off.

Sam hauls Sonny to the side and takes front-on aim with his shotgun at their leader, and one of the barrels misfires and the other sprays her face and neck with shot, her head snapping back, her eye gone. Ten feet away, the captain pulls Dean out the saddle and dumps him on the ground and then takes two hooves to the chest with a crunching thud, flies backwards and smacks like a ragdoll against a tree. 

“Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine—” 

Black smoke pours from every broken hole in the captain and coalesces into a battering cloud around Dean, who curls up into a ball, and the two women shudder, the leader still trying to keep herself together enough to reach Sam, none of them smart enough to flee, so fresh out of Hell, so drunk on the riches of earth.

Dean hollers, wordless, and through the smoke Sam can see him writhing. 

“ _Gloria patri_ ,” Sam thunders, from deep in his chest, makes it an order, and the two women fall as the demons are ejected, boiling through the ground, and the storm around Dean collapses too, down through the dirt and back to Hell with a shriek, wind sucking loud past Sam's ears. 

He hits the ground by Dean's side, crying his name.

“'m fine,” Dean groans, tries to push himself up. There's a rustle behind them and Sam whirls.

One of the women is moving, an ugly ominous choking noise. She coughs and blood sprays the air, leaks from the corner of her mouth.

The one Sam had shot. He stands over her in horror.

“Tyrant,” she whispers, through the ruin but Sam can hear the hatred in it, the meaning. He can't move. She's making a noise that sounds like crying, like pleading, her hand flapping weakly on the ground, reaching up to him, the white vulnerable belly of a fish, an underbark insect. He steps back.

Her head snaps to the side, an explosion of blood and bone as Dean shoots, his barrel to her temple, bent by her side, his hand raised to protect himself from fragments and his gaze uneasy on Sam like Sam had been the one to do wrong.

“Where's your mercy?” Dean says, blood obscuring his eyes, his lip split and swelling already. He'll have a bruise on his cheek.

“Mercy,” Sam says, numb. “I've read about that.”

::

He's not fully aware how they make it to Homer. A lot of that time seems to disappear, a mess of tree and road. They sell Kubrick's horse and saddle. He rides when Dean tells him it's time to mount up and eats journeycakes when they're given to him and endures Dean's scrutiny: suspicion and doubt, he's pretty sure. He can't bring himself to analyse it too closely.

Homer is hosting a garrison of thirty or so men camped by the lake, maybe even friends of the captain they left by the side of the road. The town is humid and miserable under the rain and drowning in bootleg moonshine, astringent and undiluted. Sam couldn't begin to guess what was in the mash but it works all right, collapsing him into the armchair in the room Dean dumps him in, abandoned for hours, midnight and his head spinning so he has to close his eyes while he tips up the jar. 

Tyrant, she'd called him. Tyrant and what else. Killer. Defiler. Pretender.

There's a noise in doorway. Dean is standing there. He's been with the horses, has straw mud on his boots. He looks cold. Sam hasn't bothered with the fire; only the lamp on the table. 

They stare a while. Dean seems troubled, as he always does, these days.

Sam spreads his legs and takes another drink, eyes open this time.

“Stop it,” Dean whispers, and Sam sets the jar on the table and drops his hand to his thigh, runs up and presses there. Dean's eyes follow the movement. He flushes, sways a little and braces himself on the doorframe.

“Stop it,” he says again.

“Why?”

“We're brothers.”

“Tell the truth.”

Dean shakes his head. He looks like he's drunk himself.

“You can't save me,” Sam says, mildly, and Dean pales, his lips pressing closed. “So why not?”

“It's too much.” His eyes are fever bright, huge when they flick up.

His answer is meaningless. Too much, no. Could there be any such thing? 

He presses again, his fingers curving, so Dean can see the shape of him. He knows he's big.

Dean is in the room, three strides to stop in front of Sam. He leans down and his gaze is heavy and hot, pushing Sam back into the chair, stealing his breath. Sam is pinned, and feels it again like before, that boiling liquid roll as Dean drops his eyes down Sam's body.

He leans in more and Sam tries to sink into the stuffing.

“Devil child.” His breath puffs on Sam's lips and Sam leans up to catch him but he's already pulled away, stolen Sam's drink and disappeared out the door. 

Played him. Sam laughs, sick. He's playing himself.

If he pushed hard enough, asked often enough—

If he could be certain Dean wouldn't quit him in anger—

He could have Dean. 

Inside him, he knows, is the capacity to take something that great, Dean's words and wishes be damned. Dean wants him, that is plain enough, and what is the point of a boundary on want, a line drawn. It doesn't stop the want. It doesn't stop the sin settling in the heart. It put down roots long ago.

Want, take, have, one of this fathers says, and this time he's not even dreaming.

::

He wakes with a body climbing onto him.

“Dean,” he hears himself mumble, drawing up into consciousness, and a hand closes around his neck.

“Look at me.”

It's not Dean's voice; it's not Dean's hand, too strong, too strong even to be human, and he wakes all the way, frightened, a shadow atop him. He thrashes and can't dislodge it.

“Look at me, Winchester.”

His eyes adjust to the lamp, weak, on its last dregs. The shadow bearing him down resolves into a familiar face.

“Walker,” Sam whispers, and his hand closes tighter around Sam's throat, hooking in under his chin to pinch his breath, throttle the blood to his brain and his eyes gleam, bleak and mad. Sam's heart crashes in his ears, and Walker is too heavy, too strong.

“Well done,” he smiles.

His teeth are very white, and there are so many of them.

Sam bucks again, pure involuntary terror this time, tries to yell and can't, his vision dimming, skin on his face stretching tight. He jabs at Walker's eyes and is easily dodged, grabs at Walkers wrist and can't shift it at all.

Walker sniffs and makes a disgusted noise.

“Even your fear is tainted.”

“Animal,” Sam says, and can't draw breath again, mouth gaping like a fish, tears squeezing from his eyes. 

“Me, animal? I saw the mess you left on the road. I saw what you did to Charlie.”

Sam tries to shake his head.

“Your brother's out fucking right now,” Walker says, voice deep and smooth. “ _Me_ , animal? If he were any kind of man at all you'd have been dead long ago. I told him.”

 _Dean_ , Sam tries to yell; can only shape the word, chest spasming, his lungs in panic.

“You should be worried about yourself. Oh, don't go yet,” he says, relaxing his grip on Sam's windpipe enough for Sam to suck in a reedy breath. Sam grabs at his face without purchase, fingers slipping over his skin as he turns his face away, sneering, ugly, not wanting the contact; with his free hand grabs Sam's wrists and bends his face close, lifts his lip over his crowded needlepoint teeth. “Look at me.”

Sam can't see much of anything. His vision is swimming, spotting.

“The things I have done for you, your kin,” Walker growls. “The levels to which I have sunk. Do you see what you've made me?”

Sam tries to get purchase with his heels on the sheets, scrabbling, and Walker snaps his head up and sniffs. His eyes go to the door.

Sam bites the inside of his cheek, hard, feels flesh tear and spits the blood into Walker's face, and he rears back with a choke at the filth and Sam twists out from under him, hits the ground. Steps outside and Walker crouches, catlike, nostrils flaring and moves faster than Sam can see, back out the window he'd entered through, the curtains catching, falling behind him, the rod clattering.

“Sam?” Dean calls, alarm, the door opening as Sam tries to push himself up into sitting, his strength disappeared.

“Thief,” he gasps, and coughs blood, feels like his throat is tearing itself apart; Dean darts down the hall.

The woman he has brought with him looks down at Sam in sympathy and kneels, tucking her hair behind her ears, her skirts ballooning, a field of red. 

“Shh,” she says, “don't try to force it,” voice soft in between his wracked heaving gasps. She summons a rag for him to spit blood into and a glass of water from nowhere, holding it to his lips, a strong hand between his shoulders helping him sit. The bartender, he realises, finally; he'd bought his moonshine from her under the table last night.

“That better?” Sam nods, and she gives him a small smile. “I gotta say, sweetheart.” She pushes his hair back from his face, wipes his brow. “This ain't the kind of good time I'd envisioned.”

::

Dean returns from a quick, futile search, and sends his new friend away shortly, locking the door behind her.

Sam holds a cold damp cloth against his neck. His cheek throbs and he's still swallowing blood. His head hurts. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to drink, to talk. He can't get his thoughts in order. If Walker was what Sam thought he was—they did best amongst people, in cities, with clouds and places to hide; Sam had never encountered one, and he had sure never heard of one on the frontier. 

“So,” Dean says, and rubs at his face. “A thief?”

Sam nods, too quickly, and feels himself colour. Dean tilts his head and gives him a chastising look.

“You mean Walker.”

He can't even hide this shame from Dean. He's not sure why he bothered trying.

He lays his compress on the table and stands, brushes glass from the windowsill. The shutters are locked tight against the moon, and Walker's out there somewhere. Could be anywhere.

He wishes he knew what to do. 

“Whatever he said to you—” Dean starts.

“Vampire,” Sam interrupts, hoarse and painful, and watches Dean's eyebrows climb.

“ _Vampire_? Drinks blood, vampire? Like in Vermont?” Sam nods. “They're just stories. Crazy farmers.”

Sam gives him a look, and he holds up his hands.

“You don't have to,” Sam says, the words grating, catching; he coughs and coughs. Dean comes up with some water.

“Don't be stupid,” he says, quiet. Sam drinks and tries to control his breathing. “So what. More salt?”

Sam looks for his pencil, pulls out his father's journal and writes in a margin: _Decapitation._

Dean whistles low. 

_FAST_ , Sam writes. _STRONG. Do NOT touch the blood. do not let it get in your mouth._

Dean curls his lip.

“Will he come back tonight?”

 _he won't like sunlight,_ Sam writes, and Dean frowns, plucks the pencil from his fingers and twirls it, taps it against his teeth. 

“He put a tail on us. He came for us soon as he could. He wants you. He won't let you leave.”

Sam nods. It's nothing he doesn't know. How they are going to get dead man's blood he's not sure; there's not even a hospital here.

Dean jolts up and drains of colour.

“The horses,” he whispers, and grabs his guns and bolts, leaving the door gaping open and Sam stunned behind him; he shoves his boots on and throws his arms into his coat, and running after he loses his breath in three agonising steps, left far behind.

Dean had figured right. The stable, on the other side of town, is swollen with spring rains. Straw whispers underfoot. The mutter and shifting of uneasy beasts, near absolute dark, and as Sam hits the aisle a horse screams and kicks in fury at the boards, a deafening bang. Sam sees the shine of her black head tossing and beyond that his vision clears on bodies in turmoil, his brother and Walker struggling. Dean ducks a blow and steps back, swings a rake at his head and Walker catches it easily, jerks it forward and the machete is still in their room because Sam is too stupid to live, still in his sleeping clothes.

Walker punches Dean on the cheek. Sam hears his teeth clack and he teeters, dazed, and Walker rides him to the ground, his cloak blooming to cover them. Dean's boots scrabble in the straw.

Sam lays a hand on a hoof pick and steps forward, rips Walker's head up and jabs the point into his trachea and pulls, ripping through strong resistant tissue at a bad angle; it's ugly, and messy, jagged, blood spilling without pumping as Dean rolls, the great muscles of the neck tearing as Walker flails, reaches behind to grab at Sam. Sam jumps back, lets him drop and clutch at his neck, try to rise as Dean crawls away.

Sam kicks Walker in the chest to keep him down, barely avoids his tripping grasping hands. His head hanging wrong, the spreading black pool and his teeth glinting and his eyes pinpoints of hate.

Sam takes a shovel from its hook on the wall.

::

They cover him with straw in case the horses raised alarm, wash off at the pump outside and then Dean deposits him in the bar with his girlfriend and heads off to find barrow or some way to dispose of the body.

She takes a measured look at Sam and disappears into the kitchen, returns with a healing tea that he can't place the scent of, something deeply exotic. It's disgusting, but it helps.

“Thank you,” he says, hoarse, and watches her clean up. Her name is Ruby, he recalls; she is small, with a nice figure and cornsilk hair, and careless with and bored by her work. A man down the end leers at her, hollers for another drink, and she ignores his order, sidles up to him and whispers in his ear. 

He greys and throws coin on the bar, staggers to his feet.

It's still several hours to dawn.

Sam's father would have liked Walker. Would have respected his code and the lengths he went to. Dead now, the both of them, and Masters and Kubrick and that woman on the trail and all the rest. He half expects the door to burst open on Henricksen or Jo Harvelle or his father or Azazel reanimated. How many more will come for him. How many more times will he have to do what he just—

His stomach lurches, and he finishes his tea and sets the cup in its saucer with a rattle.

His blood will make him a target as long as it keeps pumping through him. It's past time he reconciled to the fact. His father had tried to teach him. Boston had driven home that first great joke. Eldorado had taught him, and then he'd used the city to forget once again. And his brother.

He looks up at Ruby and she sidles along towards him.

“Don't be asking for whiskey, I ain't gonna give you any.”

“Did you sleep with my brother?”

Ruby raises an eyebrow. Leans an elbow on the bar.

“That's no question to ask a lady.”

He looks down. He had washed his hands well. They bear no sign.

“You're as much a lady as I am,” he says. She drops her towel gladly.

“Clever. I was sure you would be.”

“What do you want with us?”

“I want to help.”

“How could you help us?”

“After what your brother did?”

Sam snaps his head up, eyes narrow. Foreboding coils low in his gut. “What did he do?”

“He hasn't told you?”

“Told me what?”

She hesitates, uncertain. “Maybe you oughta ask him.”

“Maybe you should talk,” Sam says, hollow and dark in this endless night, a true fear starting to wake in him, “before I make you talk.”

She pauses again. “Let me ask you something. I know the demon you call Masters. I've known her a long time. She is a stone cold bitch. You really think she would have let you go once she had you?”

“She nearly killed me.”

“Think she'd let it go at nearly?”

“Dean slit her throat.”

“When, Sam?” she says, and leans in, intent. “When did that happen? Before or after she cut you?”

“I don't understand,” Sam says, small, beating back understanding, unwilling.

“He slit her throat,” she says. “With a knife that still had your blood steaming on it.”

“No,” he stammers, on his feet, falling back, his stool knocking to the floor. A lazy grin spreads across her face.

“Now that just sounds like poetry to me.”

::

Sam glides, numb, back to his room. Dean is packing and changing at the same time, hurried, and turns to look at Sam with his shirt half-buttoned, his hair still wet. He smiles.

“You better jump—”

“I died,” Sam says, and the colour drains from Dean's face. His smile collapses. “Didn't I? On that mountain.”

Dean sniffs and turns away, throwing dirty clothes into the packs.

“Don't be ridiculous,” he says, voice light.

“You made a deal.”

Dean's hands slow. “No I didn't.”

“Would you ever have told me?” he asks, and Dean turns back to him and can't talk at all, it seems, a ghost, eyes wide. Sam answers for him, can't get the shocked wondering tone out of his voice. “You wouldn't have. How long did you get? Ten years?”

Dean cuts his eyes to the wall.

“Less,” Sam says, in dawning horror, and finds himself in front of Dean, winding his fingers tight in the front of his shirt. “How long? How long, Dean?”

Dean swallows. He still won't look at Sam.

“A year,” he says, sore.

Sam is smothered, weightless, outside of his body. It's been almost a month already. It's unreal.

“But you don't even know how.”

“You said. After that job back east.”

“Nothing specific.”

Dean shakes his head. “I think. I think if you want it bad enough it doesn't matter if you get a bit wrong.”

Sam gapes at him.

“How _could_ you?”

“I had to.”

“That's not... that doesn't...”

“I had to,” Dean says, helplessly, searching his eyes, like he could find a sign that Sam understood. Like it was understandable. “I _had_ to.”

“This isn't happening.” Sam drops him, steps back. “This isn't. You wouldn't.”

“Sam,” Dean says, voice broken, the whole of him broken, deeply, irrevocably, to have done this, to have been so cruel. “Sammy, wait, c'mere, listen.”

“You let me laugh.” The truth of it cuts sharp under Sam's ribs, a barbed arrow, fatal and permanent. “You let me laugh while you were dying.”

“That...” Dean shakes his head, baffled. “I'm not—”

“Don't talk to me.”

There's a racket in Sam's head and he jabs his knuckles to his temples to quiet it, eyes screwed closed. Dean's fingers pulling at his wrists and he's still talking, trying to tug Sam in and his touch burns, unbearable. Sam shoves him away and snarls.

“Don't touch me. Ever again.”

She is waiting for him, still, back at the bar. Sam is not surprised to see her.

“A year.”

She nods, in pity.

“He doesn't have the best poker face, does he? Not when it counts.”

“He's going to die.”

“Yes.”

“Go to Hell.”

“Yes,” she says, and her words drift into the chasm that has swallowed his world. “As one great furnace flamed. Regions of sorrow. Adamantine chains. The whole ball of wax.”

“No,” he whispers, everything in him falling away. “No.”

“Yes,” she says. “I know it well.”

His hands are trembling, and she wraps hers around, cold, perfect fingers. Black clouds her eyes, takes them over. Sam finds he lacks the capacity to care. 

She leans in, voice kind through the dead carapace of her gaze.

“Unless you can find a way out.”

::

He remembers. Before she'd died—before she'd killed him—Masters had held him in an iron grip around his throat, squeezing. The point of his knife touched the small of his back, and the tip of her tongue touched his ear, and she had whispered to him, victorious: you know how this ends. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [works referenced.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/162977557491/peregrine-chapter-3-near-burnsville-the-piney)


	4. Eldorado - Dallas - Eldorado

Eldorado looks just the goddamn same as the last time Sam had left it, baking and bleaching under the high summerward sun. He had half-hoped to never see the place again. 

They knock at the jail door and Singer opens it with a grunt and arthritic groan that Sarah Bernhardt would have blushed over.

“Hey, Bobby,” Dean says, deep friendly ease, and Singer shakes his hand strong and firm, smiling, turns the same on Sam.

“The deputy will be around soon. Sit down boys, sit down.”

“Who's that?” someone calls from the cells.

“Ain't your business!”

“Anne? Anne baby that you?”

“You quiet!” Singer hollers, stomping back there, still with a limp and Sam watches the grin spread on Dean's face and feels a swelling selfish jealousy like he should snatch Dean away, from temptation, from a place where he might find a rut to settle in, an occupation. He would be a good sheriff.

Not that he will get the chance. 

Sam sinks into a chair. Dean brings his own over and props his feet on the desk just in time to have Singer knock them off, handing them each a glass. 

They toast and Dean drinks guilelessly. Sam holds Singer's gaze and takes a deliberate mouthful, swallows, and Singer tips his glass in acknowledgement. 

Dean doesn't realise just how readily Singer might have killed Sam. Sam had been talking for his life in their final conversation, and he had lied with little compunction about the source of his visions and the ultimate meaning of the events of Cold Oak.

Singer and Mills had left him alive because Dean likes him, and they like Dean just that much. It's not a strange way to be. John Winchester had only kept Sam alive because there was a fondness between them that neither had ever been able to escape, borne of long nights and long days in company and victory in the hunt.

And now Dean is back amongst his friends and with his world expanded thus Sam feels his own contract. Masters dead and demon armies rising and all the fears he'd nursed so carefully about his own fate come to nothing if he can't halt Dean's.

::

Dean spills his guts to Singer after dinner at his house like a demon deal wasn't anything to hide from anyone, and Singer goes white and rises and calls down hell upon him, barely stopping for breath. You got no care for yourself, he berates. You got no right to be messing with such darkness as demon deals. You got no sense, trading this life for that one.

This latter argument is buried while Sam is in the room, and at Dean's wide-eyed obvious wish he keeps silent. It boils his blood though, to see Dean take it, and he leaves within minutes, fades back to put the horses away for the night and stands with Dean's girl a time, buries his fingers in her mane and in the big listening dark draws on her wild grace and says to God, he is needed. He is needed here on this earth. A glance will tell you this, look, look. Please.

He hears nothing back but Sonny huffing through straw, and throws their packs over his shoulders, heart hammering and a black angry feeling taking him over; not even sure who it's directed at, God or Singer or Dean who has done this to them in the first place. Himself. 

When he returns their voices are clear through the shutters.

“You telling me you wouldn't have made a bargain for Karen if you'd known how?”

“Karen was my _wife_ ,” Singer says, in deep shock. “Son—”

“I ain't your son,” Dean snaps. Something thumps on the table.

“I wish you were, I would give you a piece of my mind.”

“You've given it. It wasn't your call, it ain't your call, and it ain't ever gonna _be_ your call. I let you speak, now you hear me. You trust me or you don't and if you don't you say so right now so we can get moving before the ground gets cold.”

There's huffing and shuffling and Sam can imagine Bobby shifting at the table, disgruntled.

“Untwist your knickers, kid. Sit down. You know I ain't tossing you out, or him neither.”

Dean mutters something and the door bangs open six feet to Sam's right. Dean sees him immediately, lurking, eavesdropping, and his face is hard and blank in the dim yellow light. He moves his hand in a complicated shape that means _no_ and _I'll be back_ and stomps down the hard-packed road in his shirt-sleeves only, shoulders broad, righteous, fading into the dark. 

The direction of Cassie Robinson's house.

Sam turns away and goes inside, puts the bags down. Singer is in the kitchen, staring at the stove fire. 

In his own fashion, the old man loves Dean, that's clear. It's enough cause for Singer to hate him, and Sam would have been first in line had the positions been reversed; and it's enough for Sam not to be able to hate him altogether. He swallows, shoves his hands in his pockets. 

“Bull Run's got nothing on this place.”

“Don't talk of what you don't know,” Singer says, gruff, and points to a chair next to the one in which he is slumped. He pours more whiskey, unadulterated this time, and slides it over, sighing. He looks at Sam. 

His eyes are kinder than Sam would have expected.

“Your daddy see much action?”

“Some,” Sam says, and lays his hat on the table, swirls his drink. “Most of his work in those fields came after.”

Singer nods, drinks. 

“Plenty of that work too.” He looks at Sam, grave, sad. Dean is still in the room, somehow, and it's too much, it's too much for Sam to bear. His voice cracks.

“I wish he hadn't. I wish he hadn't.”

“Me too.”

“Fuck,” Sam whispers, and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“That's about the sum of it,” Singer says and shakes his head. “You know, kid. I could tell from the moment he brought you in that something like this was gonna happen.”

“You were blind drunk,” Sam says, weary. “You couldn't tell a hawk from a handsaw.”

Singer gives him a measuring look over his glass.

“Well it's a south wind now,” he says. Sam smiles grudgingly, and rubs at his face.

“I'm counting on it. You got some books I wanna read, Sheriff.”

“Kid,” Bobby says, and holds up his drink. “That's what I was hoping.”

::

Sam takes a Rosicrutian and a mug of tea to bed with him, a cot set up for his use on one wall of the spare room, the big bed dragged to the side.

Dean, on his return, pauses in the door. Sam looks at him, wordless. They are out of place with each other and have been since Homer; he has found a way to ride in peace with Dean but he is not capable yet of forgiveness or even easy talk and friendship.

Dean clears his throat.

“Bobby says we're sticking around.”

“He'd know.”

“Sam,” he says, and sits on the bed heavily. “I thought we were here for—for your thing.”

“My _thing_?” Sam says, arch.

“You know what I mean.”

“I'm an abomination, Dean,” Sam says, and Dean's eyes snap to him in bright dismay, his mouth breaking downwards. “I'm here to lead armies and betray mankind. What more is there to learn? Your chance to lay my _thing_ to rest you had on that mountain. And you took it back. So now we deal with _your_ thing.”

“You're not—you're not gonna lead an army—”

“Of course I'm not, you—you fucking—” Sam slaps his book shut and levers himself up, crosses his legs so his knees aren't up around his shoulders. “I'll get you out of this,” he says, “I will,” clear and sure, and Dean flicks his eyes away. “I _will_. It's gonna take work is all.”

Dean studies him. “I know you don't like this place.”

“I don't like any place,” Sam says, and holds close the rest of it, its truth too piercing: but you're here.

Maybe Dean can hear it anyway. His lips twitch, the closest thing to a smile he's given Sam in a week. He lies down, shuffles and settles on his side, facing away, and Sam lies back as well, listens to him breathe in time with the creaking house and turns the pages of his book.

And that is May, all the rest of May and some of June too, going through the old man's library, bigger and more comprehensive than Sam could possibly have expected. Other books belonged to the late Harvelle husband, and they spend time up at that ranch too, and drink at her saloon.

Jo Harvelle is making time on the Chisholm Trail with 400 head of longhorn, reduced this year with their cares placed elsewhere. Her absence is something both he and Dean are glad for, but her mother has a touch of the general to her, managing their energies and movements, and her barkeep Ashley reveals himself as something of a scholar: a reject of Yale Divinity, for vices Sam can only imagine, but he keeps up correspondence his old professors and the sons of luminaries, Fisher and Gummy Pearson and Caldwell Colt. 

He and Singer and Harvelle have been working steadily at the demon increase for months now, cataloguing sightings and winnowing signs from across the country. They scour Cassie's subscriptions, and have bought others, nationals, locals, dailies, weeklies, stacking up in the back room of the bar.

They fall into a pattern. Dean refuses to be a part of any of it, and the first few times Sam and Ash open a book together he heads out to the Harvelle ranch with a hammer and chisel and reshingles their whole stable; when that's done goes around fixing things Ellen needs fixed, makes himself scarce some other way, steering clear of town and its hard-eyed gossips. Twice he heads out with Singer on a ghost sortie, leaving Sam to fret away the night, pretending to himself and God he's reading.

The worry never fully subsides. There is less to these books than he had expected. 

Within a fortnight Ash and Harvelle are drifting, hour by hour, back to their former concerns.

Dean claims he doesn't know the name of the demon he summoned, and Sam's afternoon project for a week is _Ars Goetia_ , for the sixth time in his life, in the dim hope that this could be ended by the summoning and simple death of one demon. He does this in the Harvelle bar, Ash at his elbow, and three other books for cross-checking, adding references to a list for Jody's trek to San Francisco while Ellen argues with her deliveryman.

Familiar movement outside and Sam glances up and Dean walks past, Cassie on his arm, their heads bent together. 

Down here in the heat Dean has taken up shaving again. 

Sam can barely stand to look at him.

He rises and fixes himself a drink. Ellen sends her man away with a disgusted grunt, comes back to throw her ledger under the bar. 

“This life is nothing but avarice and thievery,” she mutters. “Gimme the good news, kid.”

Sam swallows, looking down at his glass.

“You married into this, didn't you?”

“Yes,” she says, after a moment, and leans carefully back against the bar, folds her arms. Sam can glance right past her and see Dean and Cassie hail Jody on horseback, who reins up next to them and says something that sets Cassie laughing.

“You regret it?” Sam asks, and Ellen frowns.

“Sam,” she says, her voice gravel. “Has anyone told you how my husband died?”

::

Sam leaves, lets his feet take him around town, and finds himself staring at the boarded-up entrance to Masters' saloon. The back door is only locked, and he picks his way in a second time, stands in the middle of the dusty room. There's still a bloodstain on the floor by where the piano used to be.

Dean finds him in there at sundown, playing patience at the table she'd claimed the first time he'd laid eyes on her, unknowing of her truth, her power, her reach into his past and future, another one of those black ropes lassoed him and bearing him down. 

He is losing.

“Hey there,” Dean says, careful.

“Having fun?” Sam snits. Dean pulls out the chair opposite and ignores his rudeness. Sam bites his lip, grateful. “I mean, keeping busy?”

“No,” Dean says, and sucks in his cheeks, whistles. “I am decidedly not. I've never been so long in this town. It's not, ah. How much longer, Sam?”

“As long as it takes.”

He doesn't mention any more the fruitlessness of his labour. Dean has walled himself off from talk of that kind, refusing to risk compromising his deal. They breakfast together and fall into their beds at around the same time, and he seems about as far away from Sam as he did back when they first met.

“You know how the Harvelles know—” Sam stutters over the next word, never quite making it seem natural “—our father?”

“They knew him?”

“He got the husband killed. Used him as bait.”

“Guess that explains some,” Dean says, frowning, unhappy with the knowledge.

“Guess it does,” Sam says, and feels himself grow bitter again, so dangerous, twisting up into someone ugly and unwantable, why would Dean stay, why would Dean ever think he made himself a bargain? If he were smarter he would be pleasant, he would be a laughing joy, pretty and with purpose, he would make Dean's time with him worth it. 

He shuffles and lays out a four-card pinch and commences losing again like he's falling down a well, moss and slime and no way to grab purchase, to scramble free and the circle of light growing smaller.

 _You'll get her dead._ He's so close to saying it, cheeks stretching, burning on his tongue, caustic. _They always die._ And it's true, is the kicker, and he likes Cassie even though he'd also hated her from the moment he'd laid eyes and if he could get himself right he would want her for Dean, would want Dean for her and he would also want her far from harm, which is what follows his people around like a black dog.

“Hey kid,” Dean says, and kicks his foot, and all this kid business in this town is a capital offence all on its own. “You got steam coming out your ears.”

“Thought Cassie gave up on you,” Sam says, and ignores Dean's sharp intake of breath and lays the ace of diamonds carefully to the side, collects three more cards in the palm of his hand, swaps the top invisibly with the bottom and throws down the two for good measure, and the rest in his palm, and the rest of the deck which scatters violently across the table, the roar in his head biting now, under his skin, lifting him out of his chair. “Don't judge him. Don't you judge him. You weren't there. He did what he had to do. It nearly killed him.”

“Killed a few other people besides,” Dean says, his face a mask, bland, staring up at Sam, sitting easy in his chair like none of this had cost him a cent when Sam felt so deep in the hole most days that he could barely breathe.

“Yeah,” Sam sneers. “Well, he never threw his own soul away. And he wasn't a liar. If he could see you right now he'd go for his belt.”

“Well there was one lie,” Dean says, furious colour blooming high on his cheeks, his knuckles white. “Maybe I got a few questions for him myself.”

“Give it a year,” Sam spits. “And you can ask him to his face,” and he kicks his chair out of his way, lets it clatter, awkward and impotent, and bolts, the door banging in fury behind him. 

Cassie opens her door to his second round of knocking, eyes him with alarm and doesn't let him in. He is breathing too hard, he knows, has no control over the shape of his face, has no idea what shows. He presses his hand into the door jamb and tries not to loom.

“Will you keep him with you?” His voice is thin, despairing. “I'm—I'm ruining—”

“He won't stay.” Her eyes fill with tears. “He won't stay with me. He never has.”

“What do I _do_?”

“Save him,” she says, and reaches for him, and he recoils, shaking, and retreats once more, to the church this time, as small and crowded with memory as any he's ever been in, and as hard on his knees, and as silent.

::

John Winchester was the greatest man Sam ever knew of, ever heard of. Countless people owed their lives to him. The lives of their loved ones. He moved through the world like a giant.

Sam has seen him block a hatchet blade with his arm and heard his father's bone sing as he cut up under for a killing blow.

Sam has seen him skip right up to a Major-General and insist the man deserves a drink and a cigar from his old friend of the Twenty-Seventh.

Sam has seen him scoop a child right out of the ground and cradle her four howling miles through low country back to her mother.

Sam has cleaned up his piss and shit and vomit but still. There was no one Sam knew that could ever compare.

For twenty-three years of his life at least.

::

The first week of June Jo Harvelle returns, dusty and tired, bearing money from the sale and a telegram that she pulls out of her trouser pocket and hands to Bobby with dissatisfaction showing clear in her eyes.

“Is that it?” Ash says, lighting up, and Sam lifts his head.

“Is that what?” He asks, and Bobby nods, pleased, and turns the paper around.

DEAL, it reads. DALLAS GRAND WINDSOR SATURDAY 5.30.

::

So they trade the small town for the big one, leaving the horses in the tender care of Jody, taking the stage to Austin and then the sleeper to Dallas.

They are both relieved to be going. Jostling gently side-to-side in the car Sam dreams himself into a sideways life, a warm soft space, dimly lit, safe; Dean's arm rests across his shoulders. They are sitting on a couch and he is tucked into Dean's side, like a boy. Dean is combing through his hair with his fingers.

“You like it so much you grow it yourself,” Sam hums, deep, catlike, and Dean sings him a lullaby, _ain't got time, ain't got time, ain't got time._

::

Summer in the city and it stinks. Dallas is new, wider and lower and hotter than Boston and the people move slower along unpaved streets. Sam stands on a railway platform still smelling of fresh lumber and wonders what it could possibly offer them.

Bela Talbot, waiting for them impatiently at the Grand Windsor, turns out to be one of the fanciest woman Sam has ever seen. He guesses immediately that she doesn't know the full portent of the gun that she shows them. It rests on thick red velvet with notches for thirteen bullets. Four are missing.

Dean picks up the Colt and weighs it, checks the chamber, the action. It's a beautiful gun, long-barrelled and old-fashioned maybe but exquisitely engraved, crying that it will fear no evil. Dean sights along the barrel, and refocuses his gaze to Sam, eyes sharp and satisfied in the lamplight.

Sam's mouth goes dry.

“Why Mr. Murphy,” Talbot says, her plummy voice rich and fascinated. “You're much prettier than I expected.”

Dean sets the gun back in the box, folds his arms and looks around uncomfortably. The Grand Windsor is far richer than they were expecting, and several of the employees had scorned even their best trousers and shirts and new hats that weren't held together by sweat and dirt. The great suspended chandelier looks lethal, and Dean had skirted it superstitiously as Miss Talbot led them to a private corner of the bar.

She is young and smooth and wears a daytime blue silk dress with perfect ease. She has diamonds in her ears. She smirks knowingly at them.

“You're willing to trade,” Sam says.

“There are some ladies.” She shrugs. “They stole a book from me. I would like it back.”

“You think we're thieves?” Dean growls.

“I think you will be just about anything you have to. And I think you want this gun.”

“What book?” Sam asks.

She taps her lips with her nails. They are the same deep red.

“A certain book on witchcraft.”

“The _Hammer_?” Sam says, confused, and she cocks an eyebrow. “You could try a bookseller for that.”

“Yes,” she says. “But I want _this_ edition.”

Dean darts a glance at Sam and Sam shrugs.

“If we're just thieves,” says Dean, “why don't we steal the gun from you?”

“Another thing,” she says, and leans in. Her décolletage is splendid. She knows it. “These ladies; they've used it to kill already. Really, you'd be heroes.”

“Well,” Dean says, and sighs. “Where is it?”

::

Talbot has arranged a boarding-house for them in the cluttered streets south of downtown, and they take the front room on the right. Only just yesterday vacated; Sam doesn't want to know how she managed that. The landlady makes dubious promises about the excellence of her board, points to the nearest post office and mule-car line, and informs them of the curfew.

Their neighbour in the room opposite, Miss Elizabeth Standhope, has come to Dallas to be a teacher. She is returning home as they arrive and takes a strong interest in Sam. It's tremendously embarrassing. 

Her father, a hundred miles east, is a harness-maker and a stamp-hand, and his work hangs proudly around her room, mountains and wolves, three-armed cacti. Her shelves are stacked with books and well-thumbed frontier periodicals.

Her hair is thick and blonde, with a gentle curl.

She grows tarragon and white sage on her windowsill.

Three weeks ago her teacher drowned in the bathtub.

::

They watch her for two days, surreptitiously; Sam tails her to her church and home, college and home without spying a sign of malevolence.

“Talbot is sure she's involved,” Dean says on Tuesday, as they buy peanuts from a stand outside the library and wait for her to emerge, loitering in the shadow of an alley. “But Lord. She's even more boring than you.”

“Talbot is a mercenary and an opportunist.” Bobby had told them that much. “She could be lying about any or all of it. I mean, _Malleus Maleficarium_ is used against witches, not by them.”

“So her teacher that died,” Dean says, and straightens as the doors open and she steps outside. “Maybe she was the witch.”

Sam watches her struggle, her briefcase heavy, pulling her down the steps. She lifts it until she can get her arm around, hold it closer to walk easier. Her skirts catch, showing her boots. She smiles up at the sun.

He shakes his head. “She seems nice.”

“Well, kid,” Dean says, and throws a shell at Sam's nose, and another, and summons a lukewarm grin when he gets Sam's attention. “Guess you’re gonna find out.”

::

She opens her door readily and then looks surprised to see him.

“Miss Standhope,” he says, and touches his hat. Her cheeks pink and she gapes at him.

“Sorry, I was expecting...come in,” she says, and her eyes brighten, and she grins. “Come in, please.”

“I was hoping to borrow a book.” Sam gestures to her shelves and she brightens even more.

“You like to read?”

His cheeks heat under her regard and he bends to examine the titles. It's all science and geography, history and textbooks. She hovers by his side.

“Yes. I haven't had much time, lately.”

“A true cowboy,” she says, still smiling. “Not even a rodeo flash. Did you buy that shirt fresh yesterday?”

“Last week.” Sam plucks at it uncomfortably.

She chuckles. “And your brother?”

“My brother,” Sam says gravely, “is a wild outlaw,” and she laughs and holds the back of her hand to her forehead in a mock faint.

“And why have you come to the city, cowboy?” she says, and Sam is saved from answering by a knock on the jamb, and a woman dressed in elaborate mourning.

“Lizzie honey?”

“Oh, Tammy, you're here,” Elizabeth says. “Tamara van Allen, Mr Sam Winchester.”

“Ah,” she says, amused. She has strong features, her dark hair plaited and pinned at her neck. She nods her head in the barest of curtsies. “The Neighbour.”

Elizabeth blushes and hushes her, fairly runs towards the table, a covered jug. “Sit, honey, sit.”

“Stop fussing, Lizzie.” Mrs van Allen bends confidentially towards Sam. “My dear husband died last week and she thinks I'm about to fall apart.”

“Oh,” Elizabeth says, uncertain.

“Sorry for your loss, ma'am,” Sam says, and the corner of her mouth twitches up.

“It was his own fault. He'd had—how much wine did they say, sweetheart? Two bottles. Choked himself on the cork of the third.” She tucks a stray hair behind her ear. “It's a shame they found him before the rats did.”

Elizabeth darts a glance at Sam.

“Tamara, you're not yourself.”

Mrs van Allen smiles kindly at her.

“You're right, of course.”

“We mustn't speak ill of the dead.”

“Speak ill?” She inspects her nails. “Speak ill? I name him Amnon.”

Elizabeth gasps in shock and Sam raises his eyebrows.

“Excuse us, Sam,” Elizabeth says, and pushes him out of the door.

::

Mrs van Allen, the landlady informs them, is the snootiest woman in town, and one of the wealthiest. Her husband, God rest his soul, had been a sheep man and then an oil man, and they had just built one of the largest mansions in The Cedars.

They survey it and despair. It's heaving; her whole family seems to be moving in, an older woman directing servants and someone who has to be a sister by her features descending from a handsome carriage, surveying the scene with cold satisfaction. She waves down the street, and they see van Allen waving back, walking rapidly. She's not carrying anything but a green posy; Elizabeth's herbs, most likely.

“Maybe the book's under her bustle,” Dean says, and Sam elbows him. The women embrace, laugh. “So, we steal it, out of this busy house in this busy street in the middle of Dallas, without anyone seeing, and then?”

“I mean,” Sam says, uncomfortable. “She did kill her husband. And that teacher.”

“You think.”

“I think.”

“Say we—” Dean's mouth turns down. “Say we kill her. What about the girl?”

“Elizabeth is innocent.”

“Elizabeth,” Dean says, with meaning.

“Miss Standhope. She wouldn't hurt anyone.”

Dean is silent a moment, darts a careful glance at Sam.

“She kinda looks familiar, wouldn't you say?”

Sam feels his jaw tighten, keeps his eyes forward, and Dean sighs. Sam lays a hand between his shoulders and stands.

“Keep watching,” he says. “I've got some research to do.”

::

The Trinity Club on Sycamore charges him three dollars to spend an hour in their library, and makes him scrub the bottom of his boots before he enters. A businessman's club in the main, their section on the occult is pitiful.

Their collection of newspapers, on the other hand, is excellent.

Paul van Allen's obituary mentions an unexpected wedding; a party hosting the governor on this date; a lucky oil strike; and other minor miracles. Sam tracks the dates through and reads that Tamara van Allen, a teacher of a modest background, has enjoyed great success of late, while her sister Amanda has become the darling of the Democratic set. 

Parties, society, wealthy husbands. Elizabeth Standhope is still rooming in a boarding-house, studying, and dreaming of cowboys.

The sun is fading as he leaves, a few clouds gathering courage on the horizon as the sky blazes orange, then red, then pink around them. He hangs his jacket over his arm and watches the show a few minutes; crosses downtown and refuses to think about the passing summer.

“You never sent for me.”

She is leaning against a wall a block from his room, arms crossed, her muslin dress the brown of dried blood, and cut as low as could be marginally thought decent. 

He hasn't seen her since Homer. She turns his stomach.

“What do you want.”

“I want to help,” Ruby says, like he's a feeble-minded. “I _told_ you.”

She hadn't told him anything. He’s not an idiot. She'd dangled baubles of hope in front of him while he was too beaten to recognise it. 

“Forgive me if I don't trust the word of a snake.”

“Trust me or don't,” she says, and tosses her hair. “You're up shit creek all the same.”

He stalks on and she huffs and jogs after.

“What are you doing here, Sam? Time's ticking.”

The sky has faded into grey; everything is grey. He stops and takes her arm.

“How?” he says. “How could you possibly help us?”

“You're here after witches, no?”

“I don't need your help with that.”

She smirks, tucks her arm around his and walks him back to their rooms and outside the gate kisses him on the cheek in full view of all, with men tipping their hats as they pass. His skin crawls. He can't shove her away.

“It's not just witches. Witches are whores. It's who they serve you should be worried about.”

“Demons,” Sam guesses, and closes his eyes. “They draw their power from demons.”

“Not just any demons. Not a Biestchen like me.”

“ _Who_.”

“Patience, kiddo. In the meantime,” she says, and presses two small hex bags into his palm. “These will stop them finding you.”

“Will it stop you finding me?”

She ignores him, glancing past his shoulder.

“Oh, who's this twitching the curtains?” she says, deeply amused, and bats her eyes at him. “The future Mrs Samuel Winchester? Does she know it's hopeless? Does she know you pine eternally for another?”

Sam cranes his head back, queasy.

“Poor, doomed, beautiful, impossible...Jessica,” she says, and grins, wickedly, and he pulls away from her unsteadily, opens the gate.

“Touchy,” she calls, but he's at the door already.

“Sam, hello Sam,” Elizabeth says, on the other side, frozen and startled in the hall, her hand in midair where it was reaching for the doorknob. Her eyes go behind him and when he looks Ruby is waving merrily. Elizabeth waves tentatively back. “You're not inviting your friend in?”

“She's not my friend,” he grits.

“Oh,” she says, relief, and turns to her rooms, and back to the front door, and then touches her bare hair. “Oh, my hat, good day,” and flees back inside and shuts the door with thud. A faint wail seeps from underneath.

::

“A demon,” Dean says, deadpan, and pours himself a drink. “Another fucking demon.”

Sam smiles, tired, and rubs his face.

“A powerful one, that probably knows we're coming. If we had the knife,” he says, and holds up his hands when Dean glares at him. “If we had the gun, then.”

“The gun,” Dean repeats, frowning. “Okay. I'll get the gun.”

“How?”

“Ah,” Dean says, and raises his eyebrow. “Needs must when the Devil drives.”

“No,” Sam says, and Dean snorts. “I don't even want to know.”

He sees Dean out; packs their bags; paces his room for what seems an eternity; fetches ice, and on his return finds Elizabeth waiting in her room, her door open. She has made tea, set out nicely on a lace tablecloth, and rises as he passes, and calls through to the hallway.

“I wanted to apologise,” she says. “For earlier. And yesterday too I suppose. Tammy can be so dramatic these days.”

“There's nothing to apologise for.” He deposits his ice inside his door and steps back over, leaves hers ajar enough for propriety. He doffs his hat and holds it in front of his chest, not knowing how to respond to her earnest eyes. 

“You're going,” she says, face falling, plaintive. “Already?”

“Tomorrow,” Sam says. “I think.” He swallows, scratches at the back of his head. “May I have some tea?”

“Please.” She gestures towards the other chair, wipes her palms on her dress and sits. Shows him a disappointed smile and then ploughs on through into something more genuine. “Did you see those clouds earlier? It'll rain tomorrow.”

Sam smiles.

“Most likely.”

“Summer storms are always so violent.”

“Yes,” Sam says, quietly. “But I can't delay.”

She nods, trying to hide a sigh, and pushes the plate of ginger snaps at him and they make small talk again and it's not so awkward; they talk of the heat, and life in Shelby County, and her sadly-missed mare Peachblossom, and her school friends Tamara and Amanda, who have sharpened cruelly under the bright light of their achievements.

Nine o'clock, and the tea gone, and sweets, and Sam stands and she takes his hat from him, turning it over, puts it on her head a moment and winks at him before she hands it back, wistful. They embrace and she smells so good, warm, homely, floral; she kisses him on the cheek, and on the corner of his mouth, and his eyes fall closed and he and kisses her back, brings a hand up to cup her face, her soft warm skin. 

It's been so long since he had someone real in his arms.

When he draws back she has her eyes shut and he traces the pale line of her eyelashes, across her cheek. Rests his thumb on her parted lips and they're being watched: Dean is watching them through the open door, Sam's not looking but he feels it, flushes hot all over, and she kisses the pad of his thumb, opens her mouth to let him bend it inside and her lips close around. She’s breathing fast through her nose and opens her eyes, glossy and the blue darkening and kindling wild and his stomach clenches with the weight of Dean's eyes on him.

He swallows and pulls away and she blinks at him, shocked, crimson, and he's a mess, he just doesn't care, he could, right now by the look on her face she would let him into her bed and he could, he likes her just fine but he doesn't want it. 

He just doesn't want it. What he wants he can't have, and the rest of the world is just gimcrack imitation. He would rather have nothing at all.

::

She locks the door behind him, shaking, and he tries to get hold of himself before entering his room. Dean is going through the packs, looks over when he enters like nothing is amiss.

“Talbot was heading out to a party,” he says, easy. “She says the van Allens are top of the guest list.”

“You got it?” Sam asks, his voice as close to normal as he can manage.

Dean lifts his coat for Sam to see, a new long holster slung low along the line of his thigh, and Sam runs hot again, out of control. He turns away before Dean can see, and fishes in his bag for his lock picking kit.

::

The book is nowhere downstairs; the women's bedchambers are frivolous and dense with trinkets, clothes, jewellery, unpacked boxes. They seem to be completely unlearned.

They have only ten minutes to search, in the end: Sam is wrist deep in a drawer of underclothes, lavender rising up in a cloud, when there is a bang from below and free high chatter rising the stairs, the women home hours early, and Dean stands, pulls a leatherbound book from between the mattresses and the Colt from its holster, has it aimed at the door as the sisters come in.

“Darling!” Tamara cries, gleeful at the sight of Sam, fishing in her purse and coming out with a small shining Derringer. “You had but to ask!”

Dean shoots her in the heart and she crumples, human, down into her skirts, shock and blood spreading, and her sister Amanda roars with laughter.

“ _Cowboys_ ,” she spits. Raises her hand towards Dean and Sam grabs the nearest thing, a hairbrush, pelts it at her head. She swipes it aside to explode on the wall; stumbles, violently, from a blow from behind.

The poker hits the ground. Ruby’s hands are smoking, and she claws her fingers into Ruby's hair and throws her into the room, over their heads as they dive. Ruby hits the far wall with force enough to break plaster, shatter a window.

Dean, still rolling, thumbs back the hammer and shoots again.

Between her eyes. She convulses, lit from the inside out, burning. Her evil consumes itself.

The body collapses face down: hair blooded, silk hat blown away, her petticoats stark and white.

A wail from the hall, and the crash of a dropped lamp. Sam looks up to see the hem of the mother's dressing gown catch fire, and she looks at them over the bodies of her daughters and wails again, lips drawn back over her teeth, a desperate animal sound.

“Go,” Ruby gasps, urgent, and pulls Sam up off the ground.

“Dean—”Sam steps backwards. Dean is frozen, eyes on the dead girls. The woman bends, grabs the Derringer.

“Dean!” he shouts and Ruby screams _go_! and he fists the back of Dean's jacket and the woman steps up—over—

“Dean Murphy,” she snarls, hateful, and raises the gun, and Sam pulls his brother out the broken window and somehow they slide intact off the roof, slamming into hard untended dirt. He pushes Dean stumbling down road, slapped by branches, shots banging behind them, and doors, and a raising outcry, whipping them down several blocks at full tilt.

They are forced to a halt behind a little row of stores, pressed against the stone, gasping, lungs burning. Sam's arm stings and he touches below his shoulder and his fingers come away wet, a thin bullet graze that lights into a line of fire when he sees the blood on his fingertips. He makes a considering face and glances up at Dean. 

Dean's panting still, his breath off, queer, looking at Sam's fingers, meets his eyes and like Sam's called him comes in hot and mindless, hooks his hand around Sam's neck and tries to pull him down.

Sam jerks away, backs into stone and Dean keeps coming, dazed, his lips parted.

“Sam—Sammy—”

“Stop, Dean, stop,” he says, grabbing his wrists. “No.”

“Yes,” Dean breathes, and makes another try.

“Brother, no,” Sam says, and slides sideways, almost tripping. Dean follows him.

“No,” Dean says, presses solidly into Sam, against him, his hot breath on Sam's cheek as Sam wrenches his face away. “Murphy, Murphy, come on.”

“You're not,” Sam gasps, and shoves a hand against his chest and gets air between them. “Look at me, hey. You're not. You're Winchester. You don't want this.”

Dean blinks at him, waking, and pales, lost in the moonlight, blood beading in a line down his cheek. Such a beautiful catastrophe Sam's brother is; it astonishes Sam that he has the strength to refuse.

There is a sacrifice here, he thinks, a knot yanking the pit of his stomach, watching Dean fall away in horror. An offering. Of such magnitude that it has to save them.

::

Bela Talbot eyes the Colt in Dean's holster.

“It worked, then?” Her ballgown, white and beaded, sparkles like quartz. It hurts to look at. “It killed a demon? A true death?”

Sam pulls the book from inside his jacket.

“You sent them home early,” he says, too tired for anger. “So we'd kill them for you.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“A witch and a demon? What's the problem?”

Sam thinks of the dead teacher, the dead husband, and sneers.

“Do we have a deal or don't we?” Her voice is hard. “The book or the gun. Mr Murphy here gave me his word. Of _honour_.”

Dean snatches the book from Sam's grasp and shoves it at her, leaves, and as Sam turns to follow her fingers tangle in his sleeve.

“It worked?” 

Sam nods, shortly, in distaste, watching her thoughts race, the price such a weapon could fetch. He pulls his arm free and turns his back, and follows his brother out the door.

::

They return to the Harvelle house, where once lived and loved a man who died if not by Sam's father's hand then near it; where his daughter still stares at Sam like she wants him back in the fire, and softens only fractionally in the spectacle of Sam's brother. But they eat well, and Cassie sings, and Jody fiddles. Dean drinks and laughs amongst them, his head thrown back. Sam is transfixed.

Bobby and Ellen take their pipes on the porch, and Sam joins them, hands over the Colt for examination.

“Seven bullets left,” says Bobby, and Sam shrugs.

“I only need one.”

“In case you couldn't tell, kid, there's a war coming,” Ellen says, frowning. “And their side's got all the cards.”

“They don't have me,” Sam says, staring out at the night. There's a long pause.

“You sure of that?” Bobby says, dry, and Sam catches his meaning: you sure whose side holds you. There's not the judgement in it that there might have been a month ago.

It's an easy question at any rate. He is very sure who holds him.

“He's not dying, Bobby. Not while I draw breath myself.”

“A person ain't a war,” Ellen says, carefully, like she’d never met a Winchester before at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [other people's words/works referenced.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/163016225531/peregrine-chapter-4-eldorado-dallas-eldorado)


	5. Near La Cuesta - Near Guadalupita - Crooked Creek - Harper County - Belle Plaine

Easing back up through Texas they hit a branch of the Concho and can't be bothered attempting it. Instead they trespass their way west across baking wide-flung homesteads, past men digging trenches and canals into the river bank, luring the water away, trying to bring the old ways into a new land.

They move in the morning and the evening, following mustang and pronghorn trails to scraps of scrubby green pasture and watering holes. At some point, Sam thinks, they cross the trail they made to get to Eldorado the first time, over a year ago. He feels like the land should have retained a sign.

Sam wants summer forever; he wants each day hotter than the last and no solstice; he wants each day longer than the last and no nocturn; he wants the sun to petrify them, side by side. His skin starts to dry and tighten. He keeps his shirt unbuttoned, under his neckerchief but it still tans in a deep v. He feels like his eyes are pulling into his skull. His sweatband does nothing to protect his hat.

Sonny could not be more unimpressed with their circumstance, and even though Dean's girl is all black but for her blaze and a half-hearted sock or two it's Sonny the flies swarm, massing around his eyes, the corners of his mouth. He uses Dean's girl's tail as a switch until she finally takes an annoyed bored swipe at him. During their noon siesta Dean braids him a new browband with long leather thongs.

They have no destination but away. Sam has vague ideas about the coast, but Dean seems content to simply ride. They wash in a hot spring he knows of, a deep pool up near the source, almost naked, facing away from each other in a new modesty. The water is nearly as warm as the air.

Dean's skin shows through his wet white smallclothes, and Sam has to repeatedly force his eyes away, shamed, from the curve of his buttocks, the bow of his thighs. He digs his toes into the rock and bends down to dunk his head, scrub soap through his hair. It's getting long enough to tie back, which is a bitch in the heat, but he kind of likes it anyway.

“Forgot how much this smelled like sulphur,” Dean says, voice thick. Sam wishes he hadn't said anything, had been trying not to think on it himself. He rinses his hair and flicks it up, darts a furtive glance at Dean. Dean is staring at his back.

Sam gropes a hand behind and finds the scar.

Brother, he thinks wildly, in this as in all things, and Dean steps forward, hand out like he thinks he can touch.

“Stop,” Sam says, heart in his throat, and Dean freezes, eyes wide.

Sam steps out and dries himself quickly. The rocks burn his feet and he welcomes it as atonement.

::

They are in the northern arid highlands that border the desert. At night the stars, so close, are endless, awful, sublime in their infinitude. Between that and the heat it is difficult to sleep.

“Tell me a story,” Dean says, restless as a child, persecuted by a thousand pebbles and juniper needles and spiders.

Sam opens his eyes and considers. The half-moon sits in the east and Sam thinks of Selene; he sees Alioth and thinks of Bucephalus; he sees the arched neck of Cygnus and thinks of Orpheus and his resting lyre. None of these will be painless to tell. He opts for another pantheon.

“This isn't my story,” he says, dry and soft. “I heard this up top of California. Once there was Evening Star, and his woman. She was a great singer, and he was a great dancer, and they lived together happily for many years. Everyone remarked how beautiful they were, and even Rabbit left them in peace. But one day they quarrelled, and Evening Star got mad, and left for the other side of the world. His lover was sad and lonely; but after her tears were dry, she thought, I will sing such a song that he will come back to me. And she sang—I can't sing the song, I can't remember—a song of loneliness. Evening Star, so far away, still heard it, and thought he would come home. But he had lost his heart, and had to go to the centre of the world to find it, and saw her there, and recognised his heart, and they went home together. And the lover said that after the humans come, whenever a woman is left, she only has to sing to be reunited with him. Even if he's gone to the other side of the world.”

Sam is silent a moment, hating himself, and finishes lamely.

“And that was how Evening Star went up into the sky.”

Jesus Christ, he's an imbecile. He chews on his lip, sweats and dies under his thin blanket. He rolls his head to look at Dean's profile, starlit. He can see the gilded line of his eyelashes as he blinks; it's quiet enough that he can hear him breathe. Endymion, he thinks.

“Once there were two brothers,” Dean says, floating, and Sam sits up abruptly, fumbles for his water and drinks with shaking hands. Dean doesn't say anything more and Sam can't stand it, finds his boots and knocks them upside down for fear of scorpions and shoves them on, goes to check on the horses. They're dozing and unmoved by his visit, Bucephalus and her friend, and he scruffs their manes and takes a little circuit around the camp, enough light to avoid trip-up scrub and violent cracks in the earth, to see the whiptails scurrying. They are down in the wide wash of an arroyo and the standstone jags and looms purple and eerie, horizontal striations of shadow, his eyeline unstable and shifting like he's moving underwater. 

When he lays a hand on the wall it is warm as blood. He prays, to the rock and Evening Star and his father and the Father and whatever last stick of animate kindness that might be listening to put Dean to sleep, to wipe the night entire from his mind and never reflect upon how incapable Sam is of managing himself.

He returns to his bed eventually, and closes his eyes against the travelling moon.

“Is there a way to come back?” Dean says, after an age, so quiet it might not be true. “Is there a way I could stay?”

Yes, says Sam, in every cell, but not out loud. There must be. This is too great a thing to be bound by a curse, a deal, the petty hunger of a demon. This is too great a thing for the world not to honour.

::

A storm chases them into friendlier country, boiling in the east and then pelting them for days, ground turning to mud, ants teeming to the surface for succour. They shelter for a day and night in an old exhausted prospector's mine outside Guadalupita and wait it out, sweltering in the humidity, stripped to their undershirts, playing dice and cards for the shards of quartz and lumps of zinc ore they find in the shale. Sam crowns himself Croesus and commands that Dean tell him his worst story of a girl; ah, Dean says, and grins, that would be the time he locked himself in a married woman's closet for three hours while she and her husband reunited.

“You and her—?” Sam asks, and Dean laughs.

“No, I was fourteen, I was looking for food to steal.”

“Three hours,” Sam muses, impressed, and Dean's laugh soars.

“Ruined my expectations for the future.”

Heading down onto the grassland, brown and vast, Dean stops trusting Sam's ability to build a fire, sends him off to fix the horses when they stop so he can build his precious tipi of kindling and buffalo chips and Sam is stupid enough that for three nights running he acquiesces without thought.

The fourth night, scrubbing the sweat from Dean's girl before it can chill, he realises.

He pats her, rests his forehead on her neck. She leans into him in return and he tickles her whiskers as she lips at his fingers, velvet.

Back at the fire he stands and looks down at Dean. 

“Stop it,” he says, and can't even bring himself to be angry.

“What?” Dean is innocent as a maid.

“You know what.”

Dean looks guilty for a moment, feeding sagebrush into the fire, trying to provoke flame.

“She needs to get used to you.”

“She is used to me.”

“I mean I know you got your Sonny.”

Sam's throat closes over. He can't tell if he's burning or freezing.

“If she cares to stay with me she can. I'll look after her.”

“She's just—”

“Of course, Dean, of course,” he says, and his knees weaken, and he folds himself down to sitting before he falls.

They resupply in Clayton and then are menaced by the pufferfish sheriff in the next town down the road. He and his equally fat dog chase them two days clear across the panhandle, bellowing whenever they're in range to hear. Sam almost falls out of the saddle, he's laughing so hard; Dean wipes tears from his eyes and digs his fingers into his cheeks, trying to ease them.

They hear of a town on Crooked Creek where a child drowned on dry land, and head up to lay a ghost to rest. Another child is missing by the time they arrive, the town frantic and paranoid, poised on a vicious knife-edge.

They find him in the watertower, charmed in by another long-dead boy and smart enough to float instead of paddle, and after they pull him free and dry him off Dean takes a shine to his mother, a widow. 

Since Dean brought him out the boy has been clutched limpet tight around him and she pries them apart with difficulty, until he breaks and disappears behind her skirts.

Dean's eyes soften and he kneels to talk to the boy, confidential, drawing him out. The boy is chewing on his thumb and Dean holds out his own fist. The boy hesitates, and touches his spit-wet thumb to Dean's.

It's not done for the benefit of the widow but Sam sees the effect it has on her. As they are making eyes Sam slips back, mounts up and has already swung away when the whistle sounds. He raises his hat high in acknowledgement and doesn't look behind.

He has more important things to do than watch Dean playact the family man.

::

He flames the ghost's bones in the cemetery at the edge of town, and keeps on. By midnight he has found a crossroads far enough out that he won't be stumbled upon.

He calls it down.

It comes as a woman. She's dressed for something fancy, long gloves and a complicated skirt, black on black on black, her skin cream. Too frigid to be human, unwarmed by the lantern he's brought with him.

“Samuel Winchester,” she says, like his name tastes of relishing blood, and that is how he knows she is the same one who saw his brother. “What a treat.”

“Void his deal,” he says, raising the Colt to her forehead. “He lives. I live. And you live.”

She lifts an eyebrow. It's so fine it might be drawn on.

“Are you sure you want that?”

Sam shrugs off his unease. “Void the deal.”

“Just imagine,” she muses. “Just imagine what he might do for you if he didn't have to live with it.” 

Sam runs cold. The plain spreads out flat and endless around him, starless, vast.

“Shut up.”

“What he might do _to_ you.”

Sam adjusts his hold on the gun, his palm sweating. “Void it or die.”

“Or...” her lips part, coy, as an idea occurs. “Perhaps you want him alive. So you can take your time.”

“Perhaps you don't have the power to void it.”

“Hmm.” She taps a finger on her chin and pivots on her heel, circling, and he turns with her. She surveys the empty land and when her gaze returns to him her eyes are blood-red, the flame-flicker of the lamp there only thing alive in there. “You are reconciled to your sin, Samuel. Impressive. No wonder they like you.”

Sam swallows. “Who holds his contract?”

“You'll lead him to Hell any way you can, won't you?”

“Who holds his contract?”

She steps in suddenly, teeth bare and her tongue narrow as a snake's.

“I'll see him down there. I'll teach him to scream. I'll get him ready for you.”

“No, you won't,” he says, and shoots her in the forehead.

It's a long ride back.

::

Dean is not there when he opens the door to their room in the Hotel Yokum; Sam collapses onto his bed in jealous, fearful exhaustion. He dreams of the widow Braeden, bleeding from a hole between her eyes, in a black dress: He is mine, she says. He is mine, and we have plans for him.

Dean is still with her when Sam wakes; still there when he eats, his impatience festering ugly inside him. He takes three coffees and binds himself to his chair until it is ten-thirty and he cannot wait any longer, and rides around to her house.

She answers his knock, frowning. The hall behind her is empty of child and brother. She is very pretty, he can concede that. If Dean wants to stay another day or two Sam would be okay with that. Sam would live.

“Mrs Braeden.” He doffs his hat. “Morning. Might I speak with my brother?”

“He's not here,” she says. It takes Sam a moment to parse, and even then he does not understand.

“What?”

She wraps her shawl more tightly around. “What I said. He's not here.”

“Where is he?”

“How am I to know?”

“Did he say anything? What time did he leave?”

Her lips purse, and she begins to shut the door. Sam shoots his arm out to stop it.

“Ma'am, I'm not making any suppositions. I just, I must know, I must know when he left.”

Her eyes soften and she checks the street.

“Before dawn,” she whispers, and shuts the door, leaving Sam reeling. He stumbles off her porch, amongst her rosemary and larkspur and asters, the stink rising around him, nauseating.

The street is busy with people who don't mean a thing, wagons and buggies that impede his vision and his way. He jogs Sonny on to the stables, but Dean's girl's still not there; earlier, he had just figured she was hitched behind the Braeden house. 

The hotel is still empty.

He heads to the saloon, and that's where he hears it, in tones of joy and victory: Dean Murphy got led out of town at dawn on his demon horse, at the end of a rope held by a cockeyed Negro. Dean Murphy had been caught, finally, and if God had given that black Yankee loon half a lick of sense he'd take the reduced bounty and put a bullet in Murphy's head right now instead of waiting for Murphy to call down the Devil on him.

Sam can't consider the possibility. Either Henricksen had, or he wasn't going to.

St Louis is 600 miles to the east, and Henricksen had a man who'd escape if he could and kill if he had to, and he had someone coming up behind, and the counties thicker with towns every step towards the river. The Topeka line runs through Cimarron almost due north, a day's ride, uncatchable but crowded with opportunity. South is Cherokee Country, and that would be the choice for a man inclined to hiding and not averse to danger, but it's a long detour.

Sam flexes his fingers around his reins, and closes his eyes; breathes, and chooses the eastbound road.

::

It takes him three days to catch them: longer than he would have thought, long enough to make him doubt. He finds the remains of only one small and smothered campfire, and dung is the only sign he didn't judge wrong on the road taken. The land is flat, unvarying. At every fork he takes the path less travelled. Everywhere he treads is a place he might have trod yesterday. 

Henricksen was pushing his horse faster than Sam might have expected, with an iron will worthy of John Winchester; and Sonny is carrying for two, Dean's gear as well as Sam's own. Still Sonny is fast and well-conditioned, and Sam is desperate, and even then he only finds them because they're held up.

He almost rides right past. An old sod-wall lockup on the edge of a crumbling burned-out frontier jumble; it's the only building with a roof left to it and that too is half gone.

Three men are sitting on the lip of a well outside. Their horses are hitched to the windmill, its blades disappeared, its frame rotting. The men stare at Sam as he approaches, silent, and then one of them grins wide at him, most of his yellow teeth missing. 

Sam reins up, Sonny fidgeting uneasy under him, ears flat against his skull. Clouds swell dark in the distance.

“Have you seen two men pass by here?”

“We seen lotsa things,” the smiling man says. 

“Two men amongst all that?”

“I've seen a thousand men,” the smiling man says. He's bleeding, Sam realises; or not bleeding, but shot, and bloodstained, in his belly. “All weeping, churning. A sea of them. And a thousand beating hearts pumping the water in which they drowned.”

One of his companions lowers the kerchief from his mouth. His jaw has no skin, red with shreds of muscle and the lower teeth bare, turning his words into a hiss.

“We seen you, Samuel, friend.”

Sam's fists clench and Sonny rears so high he nearly goes over backwards, screams.

“Dean!” he bellows, and hears an answering shout from the jail, relief flooding glad through him even as he fights to stay atop his horse, and the men, the creatures don't move, and their horses remain dull and sagging, not caring to share Sonny's panic.

“Will you let me pass?”

The smiling man stands, and waves towards the jail in an ushering motion. His voice makes it clear that he finds Sam repulsive.

“You may as well ask if I could deny your Lordship anything at all.”

“Will you die?” Sam sneers, but Sonny breaks then, crabwalks and bucks his way out of range of hearing, and Sam has to give up trying to bend his head around for fear of tripping him, his shoulders lathered already. Sam lets him run his panic out in a wide curve around the jail, brings him down around the back and hitches him, blowing hard.

Henricksen is waiting at the door, gun drawn but lowered. He's not so well put-together anymore, his cheeks growing in woolly, his clothes dirty, his skin ashen with exhaustion. Sam stares venomously at him, mouth tightening on accusations, and shoulders past.

There is a back room, bright with the sun punching through the roof. But for spiders and birds' nests it's empty. Whatever iron was once used for the cells has been stolen.

There is a doorway without a door.

And there is a front room, with a door bolstered by a length of charred wood shoved against it, and a window, and a bare earth floor straggled with dust and debris, and Dean.

He is sitting on an upturned pail, gazing out the window in which flapping dessicated sackcloth serves for glass, holes enough to see the trio outside clearly. His hat is hanging down his back. His hand rests around the barrel of his shotgun. 

Sam had taken the Colt from him and left him with only salt. He feels ill. It could have been so bad.

Dean glances at him.

“Hey, Sammy,” he says, voice ground down, weary, slight smile in his eyes. “You just had to stop and chat, didn't you?”

Sam is frozen, a few steps inside the door, riven by a need to touch his brother, make sure he was intact, proven alive, and held by the knowledge that it wasn't the time or place; the greater knowledge that once he started he might not stop.

“How long have you been here?” he asks, sore.

“Six hours or so.”

He'd been so close, then; they'd never lengthened the lead they had on him. It seems impossible that he had not been able to feel them, somehow.

“Why'd they let you in?” Henricksen asks, pushing into the room, his gun still out. Sam flicks him a dismissive glance.

“Kindness of their hearts. They said what they're waiting for?”

“No. Backup is my guess,” Dean says, rubbing at his face. “Or night. Or for us to run out of shells. Probably all of it.”

Maybe they were waiting for those things, but there was another as well, Sam guesses. And now he was here.

“You know what they are?”

“Demons?” Dean says, and Sam nods, turns his eyes to Henricksen, who shakes his head and scoffs. 

“We been through this, Victor,” Dean says, dully, still watching outside. He looks halfway to the grave; no surprise considering Henricksen probably drove him without rest, so keen for his blood money he would ride them both to death.

“We can't stay here,” Sam says. “There'll be more soon.”

Henriksen kicks debris along the floor in frustration, a piece of sod from this disintegrating hovel in which they are forced to make a stand, and shows Sam his revolver.

“In case you don't know kid, shooting them doesn't do a lick of good.”

“We got a gun that can do it, now,” Dean says, and holds out his hand in a gimme. Sam hands it over and he smiles down at it, checks the full chamber. Flicks a glance up at Sam. “The seventh?”

Sam shakes his head, gets a narrowed considering gaze in return before Dean snaps the chamber shut.

“Six bullets, three demons. Let's go, vaqueros.”

“Four,” says Henricksen, staring out the window, and then his mouth turns down in horror. “Five.”

Dean swears under his breath. The trio has indeed swelled, and as they watch a woman appears out of nothing, steps from behind the windmill like she was arriving from another world. She runs her hand along the flank of one of the horses and its knees buckle and it hits the ground with a groan Sam can hear from forty feet away.

“Six,” says Henricksen.

“At this stage I'll thank you not to count,” Sam snaps, and Henricksen rounds on him.

“What in God's name are you in? Did you bring them here?”

“Yes,” Sam says, and shows his teeth. “I told them find my brother and kill the man who stole him.”

“Jesus.” Henricksen shakes his head. “I thought he was bad, but you—”

“Victor,” Dean says, between them, and shoves Henricksen back, snaps his fingers in his face. “Hey, Victor, you quit that shit now, I'm warning you. We got death about to knock on the door. You too, Sam.”

Henricksen rubs his hand across his face and Dean looks over his shoulder back at Sam. Sam clenches his jaw and gives him no apology. Dean shakes his head minutely, casts his eyes to the ceiling.

There's no one up there listening, Sam could tell him, and Dean shakes himself, resets his shoulders.

“What plays do we have?”

“Salt to block entry,” Sam says, and Dean twists his mouth.

“We got enough maybe for this room and that's it. Unless we empty the shells.”

“We'll need the shells.”

“And we've got, what, two windows and doors.”

“A devil's trap and exorcisms,” Sam says. “You'll have to funnel them—”

“I don't know the exorcism,” Dean says, and Henricksen looks between them and swears.

“This is a bad plan.” 

Outside the creatures outside seem bored, if demons could get bored. Scuffing their boots in the ground. There must be fifteen. One of them practices knife flipping, until he catches it through his palm. They all point and laugh.

“You got charcoal or chalk?” Sam asks, keeping an eye on them, and the dimming sky; the afternoon is darkening, the clouds thick. 

“There's an old camp in the cells,” Henricksen says, and ducks back there. Sam looks at Dean.

“Where's your girl?”

“I sent her away. His bolted.”

Sam draws up near and rests his hand on the top of his head, allows himself a moment.

“I'm all right,” Dean says, quietly.

“How?”

“On the way back from—from the house. He said he had a man outside your door.”

“He didn't,” Sam says.

“I figured as much.”

Sam tightens his fingers in his hair and tugs, miserable. He'd taken the risk anyway. In that way they were used against each other.

“I don't think I can do it,” Sam whispers, quailing in his stomach, to have to call this many demons forth from their hosts and Dean looks at him clear and steady, luminous in the fading day.

“Course you can.”

Steps in the doorway and Henricksen is there, each hand clutching a sturdy blackened stick. He twirls them like daggers and tries a smile.

Sam smiles back and steps away from his brother; flinches and ducks under an almighty crash of thunder and a seizure of lightning.

Between one fat splat of rain and the next they arrive: another five, ten, more than he can count, strung in a line around the corners of the building.

“Time to hand over the kid, Dean,” calls the smiling man, stepping forward from his posse. “And you and your buddy can walk.”

Sam presses his face into his hands. Scrubs through his hair and looks at Henricksen, hard, nods fractionally towards Dean. Dean stiffens.

“No,” he says, rising tones of alarm, and Henricksen holds Sam's gaze and shakes his head.

“That one's always a lie,” he says, grim. “Trust me. It's fight or lie down.”

“Christ,” Sam says, despairing, and Henricksen twists his lips, small and ironic. Wind belts the front of the building, and the sackcloth rips right off the window, flaps against the wall and falls.

Outside, the smiling man smiles.

And staggers, a whirl at his side and flame blazing over his heart and even as he's falling a woman breaks from the ranks and pelts directly towards them, her hood flying back, her yellow hair streaming behind her.

She dives directly through the window, crashes into the floor and rolls. 

Stands, and brushes the dirt from her coat.

“Hello fellas,” she says, and grins at them, lip bloody, teeth smeared red. “Didn't I give you a hex bag to prevent just this?”

“It was in my pack,” Dean says. A muscle ticks in his jaw. “Where'd you get that knife?” 

She holds up the blade, already gory, wiggles it between her fingers.

“Side of a mountain. Someone just threw this thing away, can you believe it?”

“Give it,” Sam says, holds his hand out.

“Possession is nine tenths of the law, Sammy.”

Sam grinds his teeth. “It's mine.”

She slaps it in his hand and gives him a dirty look.

“Dean,” Henricksen says, low, at the window. Dean joins him. Past their shoulders Sam can see the demons milling, shifting, fractious.

Sam looks at her.

“What do they want, Ruby?”

“What does their _boss_ want. Lilith. After you pulled that little trick in Dallas she's decided she doesn't like you anymore.”

“What are they waiting for?”

“You to run out of bullets. Who wants to be the first to go? But they'll get bored soon, and this—” she points to the knife, “won't be enough; and whatever that,” the charcoal in Henricksen's hands, “is too.”

“What do you suggest,” Henricksen growls, and she flips her hair over her shoulder. 

“You don't happen to have any salt, do you?”

“A few ounces,” Dean says.

“How about a virgin?”

“A _what_ ,” Henricksen says, and she puts her hands on her hips.

“Then we're gonna need blood,” Ruby says, and looks at Sam. He takes an unconscious step back. “A lot of it.”

::

Sonny's nervous about being in the back room, stepping through the waterfall made by the hole in the roof, thunder rumbling without; on the verge of planting his feet immovable in the doorway, whites of his eyes showing, and Sam has to ask him, tug his reins and whisper that everything will be all right.

He takes up a lot of space in the front room, his poll up near the rafters, his tail switching at the wall. Dean hobbles him, ropes his hind leg and throws the end over the only rafter in the room that looks strong enough to hold. 

Sam strokes his ears and kisses him between the eyes and tells him to hush, too ashamed for apologies. He makes the cut deep and fast, and jumps back through the doorway before he can catch a hoof or be smashed by Sonny's head or see his betrayal clearly. Dean catches him as he stumbles and he wrenches away, burning, sick, the whole building shuddering as Sonny crashes down on his side and groans, soul-deep.

There's blood by Sam's boots before the noise stops. It doesn't take long. It feels like an eternity.

Ruby checks first, takes Sam's hand and pulls him into the slaughterhouse. She steps into the space between Sonny's legs, his handsome dun stained and smeared piebald, his grace disappeared into the swole-bellied ugliness of a dead horse.

She taps Sam on the forehead, and he blinks and looks at her. There's blood in her hair; more, when when she kneels and bends forward to smell the pool. It brushes through and soaks up it like a wick.

“Sam,” Dean says, unsure, from the doorway, lightning flickering, his concerned eyes. Sam swallows. Outside the line of demons has drawn closer. They look feral, death in the air, sacrilege, profanity.

Sam hands Henricksen the knife and looks at Dean.

“There's only six bullets left.”

“We use them now or there'll be no point saving them at all,” Dean says.

“Don't use them, Dean,” Sam says, half a plea, and his brother and his brother's captor step through into the rear room, side by side, wary, their broad shoulders brushing. Henricksen claps Dean on the back and mutters something that gets Dean nodding, and they turn away out of Sam's sight.

Ruby makes a disgusted noise and grabs Sam's wrists, rough and inhumanly strong, and pulls him down to his knees, slams his palms into the pool. Only the backs of his hands show. All he can smell is gore, and his stomach rebels, tears pressing in his eyes.

“Focus, Sam,” she says, and there's the crunch of a body slamming against a closed door, a shout and a misfire, a shot, and Sam cranes his head to see and Ruby puts a finger to each temple and lightly steers his gaze back to her. Her eyes are green, bottomless and deathly serious.

“Do you want your brother to die tonight?”

“No,” Sam whispers, and feels the blood thicken and shift between his fingers. The sounds from the back become muffled; the room around him hazes.

“Focus. Can you feel it?”

“Yes.”

“What is the price?”

“Death for life,” Sam says, eyes going to the bulk of his beautiful horse, and her fingers steer him back again. She shakes her head.

“Death for death,” Sam says heart pounding, fingers curling, and she smiles, proud of him, pulls him in and kisses him, blood here too on her tongue, as he closes his eyes and his skull strains under pressure, iron in his nose as a vessel breaks, his mouth, between his fingers, as he pulls on the last of Sonny's heartbeats and every bonded cell and finds every demon that's not her in reach, and ends them.

::

They keep on the St Louis road. They don't know what else to do. They alternate riding Dean's girl.

They are very, very tired. Covered in smoke and ash from the bodies burned in the jail, the pile obscene, endless.

They have a knife and two more hex bags of hiding that Ruby shoved at them before she disappeared. 

They have two bullets left.

They marked Henricksen's grave with a cross they wrenched barehanded out of the windmill.

::

Dawn finds them in Belle Plaine, and noon finds Sam at the saloon bar, as does moonrise. There is still blood under his nails, and a burn in his veins, dark, poisonous.

Dean had left him for a time; joins him eventually, rests his elbow on the bar by Sam and signals the keep.

Sam can't look at his brother. Sam hates him. Sam is the fool here. He let himself get attached.

They drink in silence, a yeasty warm beer because their money is too thin for a sustained attack on whiskey. Sam's only been able to keep it going because a stockman down the end, his father's age, has taken pity on him once or twice.

Dean drains his glass and makes a face.

“I wrote to Bobby,” he says. “I asked him to find Victor's people. They oughta know.”

Sam is silent.

“He has a daughter. Maybe,” Dean says. “Maybe if we head east we could stop in with them.” Sam twirls his beer in his glass, watches the foam paint the sides. Dean sighs. “All right Sam, finish up now.”

“Why couldn't you be smart,” Sam says. “Why did you have to come along.”

“I never claimed to be smart,” he says, like it's a joke, trying to jolly Sam along when it's the whole problem, he is, he's so stupid, to hitch himself to Sam, to let himself be flattened by this life. Why would anyone do it? “You just make things complicated when they're simple.”

“I got on without you for years,” Sam says. “I don't need you.”

Dean sighs, knuckles the corners of his eyes.

“Come on, Sam.”

“Aren't you done with this yet? What do you _want_ from me?”

Dean shakes his head. “Nothing, like this.”

Sam fists his hands on the bar and lurches to his feet.

“No," Dean says, weariness and irritation battling. "Come on, stay."

The nerve he has. 

Sam abandons him. Blinks his way through several rooms to the cellar, and the stockman follows him down clutching his beer and a taper, and in the chiaroscuro dark between the barrels and the wall Sam touches and is touched, sliding out of his brain and experience on alcoholic breath, muscles and hair under his hand. It's kind for a minute, chest to chest until Sam wraps fingers around his erection and squeezes, cruel, and the man steps back and turns him, slams his face against the wall. Calls him boy and digs hard fingers into Sam's shoulders, rubbing against him, Sam's cheek bruising against the cold stone, mortar gritty under his fingers. He's still soft, and not particularly invested in changing that state of affairs.

“Boy,” the man says again, vicious, “whore,” his belt jangling, one hand jerking himself, his other arm a band across Sam's shoulders, keeping him pinned, and Sam closes his eyes and waits; waits, the room spinning, dust in his lungs, the deep grunt when the man spills across the back of Sam's shirt.

Sam sits a while afterwards, resting against the wall, lets the cold seep into him, sobering.

What about him, he wonders, called to the man here is a boy to hate. He doesn't feel like a boy. His bones ancient, his joints sore. His blood from a world beyond this one. He feels like he's giving Methuselah a run for his money.

Whore, he supposes, is close enough to the mark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The tale of Evening Star is a retelling of 'Nettie Reuben's Evening Star's Song' (Karuk Tribe), collected in _The Telling of the World_ (1996). Sung by Nettie Reuben. Trans. William Bright. Ed. W. S. Penn. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, pp. 106-107.


	6. Verona

They don't go east, to Victor's people. Instead, Bobby telegraphs them a town in southern Missouri and a train arrival two weeks hence. They arrive days early, take a hotel room under the name Gilbert, and survey their surroundings.

It's not the prettiest place in the world but it suits their purpose; an emergent lumber town, on the railroad, growing busy and impersonal. At the appointed hour Sam heads to the station and finds instead of Bobby two locked trunks, that have been knocking the knees of a very irate lawyer. He pays two boys hanging around the station to fetch him a barrow, and they help him heave the trunks in, grumbling at the weight and marvelling at what might be inside.

“Clothes?”

“Clothes go in freight, blockhead,” says the younger one.

“Gold, then,” the boy whispers.

“You are so stupid. As if they would send gold without a guard.”

“A dragon. Asleep, they become stone.”

“I believe it's books,” Sam says, adjusting his hold. There is a pause.

“Magic books?”

“I hope so,” Sam says, and tips his hat to their wide eyes, and sets off down the road to the hotel, straining, stopping under their window to call Dean down to help with the stairs.

The letter is addressed to Sam, only.

 _This is your set_ , it reads, in a hand he doesn't recognise. _We're working on the rest. Telegraph with anything that looks likely. B.S._

“This is punishment,” Dean says, pulling out a handful, half awed, half ill. There must be sixty books. An absolute fortune. God knew how Bobby had acquired them.

“Yes,” Sam says, leafing through one, baffled. It's in Aramaic. He can't read Aramaic.

“Is this a dictionary?” Dean's frowning down at the grammar in his hands, and Sam looks at it and grins.

“We're staying here, aren't we?” Dean moans, and Sam reaches across the space between them, taps a knuckle to Dean's forehead with one hand and clasps centuries of knowledge in the other. Dean goes cross-eyed, and Sam's grin widens.

“You better get yourself comfortable, brother.”

::

They trade the hotel for the back room of a speculator's house, a big, noisy man with a small, quiet wife. It's a small and quiet room, with its own entrance off the back porch, and the books soon clutter it beyond comfort, but the sun makes it through the window until well past noon. Sam buys two cheap large mirrors to amplify the lamplight for evening and night.

They have, suddenly, a domestic routine: breakfast taken with the couple when Sam can stand the husband's jokes and booming, or at the hotel if he's had a bad night. The morning is work. They take lunch together, if Dean is around. The afternoon is work. The evening is a meal; at the hotel if they're hungry, if not bread and ham in their rooms. And then work.

There is tack to mend, and clothes, and bootsoles, and resupplying to do. Dean's work, when he's home.

And Sam's work is reading.

::

Half of the books, he notes with budding horror over the first two weeks, can be set aside. Bobby has in desperate ignorance sent him what seems to be, in addition to the usual medieval and Roman suspects, a whole collection in Semitic languages, of which Sam knows only scraps. Ash read Hebrew at Yale, which means that this shipment is not even direct from Eldorado; it's been thrown together by a third party, maybe the San Francisco hookup, uncurated. One is a cookbook with a focus on winter soups. One is a midwife's guide. One he spends two days deciphering before he realises he already has a translation in Latin resting calmly by his elbow.

None of them, so far as he can tell, care to discuss the specifics of crossroads deals with any form of god or devil. None of them lay out the ten steps for outwitting the Sphinx who carries Dean's contract.

This is the end of it, he realises. The dregs. Back into Hecate. Back into the Kabbalistic labyrinths. Back into Solomon. Back into the alchemists and hermetics like Sam can solve the Mystery of fifteen hundred years in an afternoon, can hold his brother's flesh in his left hand and his spirit in his right and transform them into something eternal and uncorrupted.

::

He reads, he makes notes, and copies the notes, and sends them to Bobby, and reads some more. His headaches worsen. His dreams worsen, filling with the black vile bloodsmoke of ancient ritual.

Ruby knocks at his door.

“I have intelligence,” she says. “Take a turn with me.”

Sam rubs at his temples, marks his page and beats the room down until he finds his hat, her foot tap-tapping. Outside she rests her hand in the crook of his elbow and they parade absurdly. She has discovered a lace parasol somewhere and finds it amusing to make him hold over her head it even though the sky is grey.

“Your brother's contract has been acquired by Lilith,” she tells him, and blows a kiss to a young woman whose jaw drops, appalled. She turns hard eyes on Sam. He hurries them past.

“Lilith? No. She tried to kill us.”

“She sees you as a rival. She sees _him_ as a treat. And wenn sie damit den jungen Mann erlangt, so läßt sie ihn so bald nicht wieder fahren.”

“Lilith,” he says, tasting her name; her lore is familiar to him, but as to any vulnerabilities or weak points he is at a loss.

“Good work, Ruby,” she snits. “You faced unimaginable danger to retrieve this information and your efforts will not go unrewarded. I thank you, my brother thanks you, the nation thanks you.”

“Thank you, Ruby,” he says, distracted.

“Jesus, lighten up. You're the most miserable person I've ever met, and I've been in Hell the last—” she checks her wristwatch “—500 years. Have a little fun once in a while. Look at this Paradise.”

She sweeps her arm about, encompassing the main street ahead of them, its fork, its several perpendicular fellows, and the industry that occupies it, the hammering, a foreman's shouts, the everpresent grinding sawmill. The people and all their varieties of sin.

“It's October,” he says. “Five months,” and she sighs.

“Fine. But I ain't hanging round. I lived through the plague already, there's only so much caterwauling I can take.”

Sam's pace slows.

“You were alive? In the plague. You were _human_?”

She circles in front of him and her mouth curves down into a perfect facsimile of pity.

“Oh, child,” she says. “Didn't he tell you?”

::

_Magiae omnifariae vel potius, universae naturae theatrum_ has nothing. It has nothing all afternoon and it has nothing all evening barring a small cartoon of a cat pouncing on a mouse that some subsequent reader, beaten by its drudgery, animated in the margins. Sam flips it back and forth and tries to find the carnage amusing.

Dean washes in with the fanfare and proud sweat of a man who has been making himself useful. He stinks of pine sap. 

So he's found a job, Sam thinks vaguely.

“Well,” Dean says, throws some coin on the table and takes off his boots to bang the dung and dust and shavings off out the window. “What's the news.”

“News?”

“I know she was here. I saw her.”

“You tell me.”

Dean throws his hat down, grabs the books off his bed and tosses them onto Sam's and thumps down onto the mattress. Leans back, eyes narrowed and looks Sam up and down.

“That lying cow. She swore.”

“Oh,” Sam says, empty. “So you do have shame.”

“Who knows if it's even true,” Dean shrugs, and won't meet his gaze.

Sam neatens his notes and his pencils. When, he considers asking. But who cared. It could have been any time. It could have been back in Homer, the first time they met, and Dean had known all along what a demon was, and how it came to be, a small morsel eclipsing anything Sam's read so far or heard in his whole history of this life.

“You shouldn't be talking to her, Sam,” Dean says, heavy. “She's a demon, for crying—”

“I could leave, you know,” Sam says. “If I wanted. Maybe one day you'll wake up and I won't be here.”

Dean turns to stone. Flint sparks cold in his eyes. “That's your choice to make.”

He won't fight. He won't fight for himself or Sam. He won't fight for anything. All he knows how to do is suffer. It’s intolerable, beyond endurance.

“Abel could learn a thing or two from you about martyrdom.”

“Ain't the only one,” Dean mutters, and stands, picks up his hat again. “I'm getting a drink.”

Sam's hands clench on the desk.

“Bobby said you were just looking for someone to kill yourself for.”

Dean takes a startled step back, crestfallen.

“ _Sam_.”

“That's all I am to you.” His voice cracks.

“No, Sam. No." He steps forward and reaches and Sam recoils, onto his feet, his chair rattling. He throws his hand out, a blockade; if Dean touches him right now he's not sure what he'd do, punch him or curse him; tie him to the bed. His will is so thin right now he might straight out wring his neck. Time itself so thin right now that they might be strangers again and had never met at all.

::

_Patrologia Graeca 88_ has nothing he hasn't read before. His days shorten. He greets the word כַּלְבָּא as one might an old friend. _Le Grimoire du Pape Honorious_ contains such idiocies and sacrilege that he thinks it might actually be a practical joke. He reads Isaiah thrice and breaks the spine on _The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses_ in four places, working through the spells.

The butcher keeps a store of lamb's blood for him. The boys he met at the station trap him doves and water moccasins, bring him cat bones and an unpolished stone that turns out to be amber. The lady of the house gives over her supply of pennyroyal.

Sometimes his fathers have yellow eyes and sometimes they have brown. He is a boy, sitting crosslegged on the floor, watching his father scratch in his journal with a quill made out of a peacock feather; he writes seventy times seven words. He is dancing with Jessica in a bright apple orchard and her hair bounces and curls about him, twining, binding, making fast. He is at the head of an army of drowned men and he holds a sword aloft and cries dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla.

He has no true idea what Dean does with his days. Timberwork, he knows that much; he smells of the woods and old earth and the mill, comes home grazed and splintered, a black thumbnail this day and a popped blister that.

 _Lexicon chaldaicum, talmudicum, et Rabbinicum_ has mention of Lilith, her seduction and rejection of Adam and her habits of devouring her other lovers; and babies too. He makes note of her tastes.

Some days when it's fine he allows Dean to convince him to go riding. He borrows the lady's sorrel, fine-boned but tall enough for him to not look ridiculous, and they hack in circles through the forest, dappled and humid, without purpose. 

He suspects the lady suspects him a witch. She makes honeyed oatmeal for breakfast every morning without variation, and leads them in grace while her husband farts and yawns, reads the market and informs them of his acreage, and his latest contract, and his extended credit.

“Two years,” he says, “and this will be cow country. Mark my words.”

“I'm sure you're right,” she says, and he snorts.

“Five years and we'll have electric streetlights. Ten years and there'll be trains enough that they put horses out of business.” He grins at Dean. “How does that sound, buckaroo?” 

“Ambitious,” Dean says, and clears his throat. “Pass the coffee, please.”

“They got an electric talking telegraph now, you ever heard of that?”

“I was there when he invented it,” Sam says, down at his bowl, hand tight around his spoon.

“What a future." He puts his paper down, pats his belly. “What a future.”

“Fuck your future,” Sam mutters, pushing his oats around. Silence. The lady's teacup rattles.

“You're a cold fish, aren't you,” says the speculator, evenly.

“Ma'am,” Dean says, and rises, grabs Sam by the back of his shirt and hauls him right up out of his seat.

“I wasn't finished,” Sam says, flailing, and Dean says yes you were and pushes him out the kitchen, deposits him at his desk and throws Croker's _Fairy Legends_ in his lap.

“Hurry up,” he snaps, and Sam opens the book.

Peggy Barrett crosses herself three times and is freed. Billy MacDaniel rescues a bride with a timely God Save Us. Sea phantoms cry never again to marry creatures of the earth. The chief of Fermoy games a prophecy and is gamed right back. The death coach drives in furious career.

“I don't want this,” he says; but it's been an hour, and Dean is gone.

::

“You sad crazy little puppy,” Ruby says, and steps gingerly around his room. “What makes you think you can read your way out of this?”

“There's got to be something.”

“Is there something that says black is white? Up is down? A deal's a deal,” she says. “He sealed it with a kiss.”

Sam's stomach turns. He can't remember if he's eaten lunch or not. 

She picks up an emblem book, flips through it and snorts dismissively.

“Go away,” he says, and she grabs a letter opener now, puts the point to the desk and spins it.

“I have something for you.”

“What?”

“It stinks in here.” She sniffs, curls her lip. “When was the last time you washed?”

He presses his hand across his eyes. “What do you have?”

“A present,” she grins, and takes him past the edge of town and further, deep into the forest.

On the bank of a chuckling stream, ringed by salt and roped to a tree, binding symbols carved into the bark, is a man. His eyes are black.

“Traitor,” he hisses at Ruby. “Lilith will eat you too.”

“Tasty,” Ruby nods to Sam. “He's all yours.”

Sam steps down and considers him. Older but not old; in a suit, city clothes. He doesn't belong. 

He unsheathes his Kurdish knife, and the demon stares at it, blinks, and collapses. 

Sam looks at Ruby. 

“Oh, wonderful.” She rolls her eyes, and the demon wakes again—but not the demon, just the vessel, just a man, thrashing against his ropes, thin-voiced and terrified.

“Don't! What—”

“Hey, hey.” Sam jumps in and grabs his shoulder. He's sweating through his suit, gasping. Sam ducks to catch his gaze. “Hey, shhh, you're okay.”

Ruby clears her throat.

“You exorcise it,” she says, plain, like Sam's lost his wits, “it just goes down and comes right back up again.”

Sam stares at her. 

“You have to _kill_ it,” she says.

“No,” moans the man, and his knees fail, dropping him to the ground. His arms wrench up where they're fixed around the tree. He howls and lurches to the side to save his shoulder.

Ruby ignores him, steps up to Sam. Sam shakes his head. 

“Your problem, Sam, is that you think knowledge is power. It's not. _Power_ is power.”

“I don't—”

“You ended thirty of them. More. At once. You can do it without harming the vessel.”

“I don't even have the visions anymore,” Sam says, hollow. “And I don't—I don't know how I did that.”

A scrape of rope on bark and a wet hacking cough. Sam looks at him, too shocked for pity, too shocked for fellow-feeling.

When he turns his gaze back to Ruby she is holding out her hand in offering, palm to the sky. Blood wells from a cut in her wrist, wraps around like a bracelet, red and bright and obscene in the sun.

“What's that for?” Sam whispers, his heartbeat crashing in his ears. He stands, lightheaded.

“What do you think?”

“No.” He steps back. She sighs.

Blood pools in her palm, seeping up the creases; finds the space between her fingers and drips to the ground. 

Wasted. 

“I'm beginning to think you don't take this seriously,” she says.

“No. Never.”

“You don't want this Sam. Not enough.”

“I don't want _that_.”

“Your father would—”

Sam has the knife to her belly before she can complete the sentence, and feels good about the fear in her eyes.

“Tell me what my father would do,” he hisses.

“Look, kid” she stammers. “Look, I'm just trying to help. I don't care if you slit his throat. That thing's a sack of meat and three-quarters dead already. But you seem squeamish.”

“Go.” He's shaking. “That's not the help I want.”

“You exorcise it, it'll be back, wearing some other feckless suit, and think what happened last time you met a demon you exorcised.”

Sam's hand clenches around the knife handle and he feels cloth parting under the blade, steps in close, bends his face to hers.

“ _Go_.”

She vanishes under his hand, sneering, twisted, contemptuous, and he turns around. The man cringes, ducks his head from Sam and begs please please please, in a looping wail.

Sam closes his eyes, grit and stinging exhaustion. He wishes for his bed. He wishes for elsewhere. He wishes for his brother.

His knees creak as he kneels, face to face, taking the man's chin. He pats his cheek to focus him.

“Sorry. Hey, I'm sorry, but is there anything you can tell me?”

“What?” the man whimpers. “What?”

“Please." His voice is sand in his throat. “Please, anything. Anything you heard. About Lilith. About crossroads. About the name Winchester.”

“Winchester,” he whispers, and his head rolls back on his neck. The fabric over his shoulder stretches as he pulls against the rope. “Win—water, please.”

Sam empties and refills his flask from the stream, tips it to his lips. He coughs, spasmically, chest heaving, head bowed, drooling blood.

“I heard of Winchester,” he says, in a whisper, and then stronger. “I heard they got a special rack waiting for him.”

He lifts his head, meets Sam's eyes and grins and Sam jerks away, lands on his ass outside the salt; hauls himself into sitting, sore and old. He puts his face in his hands and can hear the amusement in the thing's voice.

“I heard they got their best standing ready to taste his entrails. And the rest of him.”

“Give me a name,” he says. His ass is damp from the ground. The stream won't stop laughing at him. “Give me something.”

“Of course when he's down there he won't be Winchester anymore.”

Sam looks at him. “What if she could have me. If she lets him go.”

He makes a sound that might have been a chuckle, had his body been capable.

“Oh, Samuel, you pissant wannabe,” he says, and tilts his head. His breath is rotten meat and sulphur. “She already has you. We live in the most exciting of times.”

Sam stands, leans over him, and stabs him in the heart.

He takes him away from the creek, covers him in branches and leaf litter, and leaves him there.

::

_The grimoires prove useless so far. Of what relevant texts you sent me,_ he writes in reply to Bobby's latest regretful missive, _it is mostly lore. Lore is all well and good. But there have been no miracles. I begin to doubt they will provide a solution. Here are truths we must confront:_

_Bribery: She will not accept. The only thing we have she wants is him, and she already has him._

_Leverage: Whose power over her is there to exploit? Who could she possibly fear? Who does she care for? No one. Who is above her but the ruler of Hell? She is the first Demon._

_Trickery, Evasion, Loopholes: A possibility. Some kind of other deal. Transfiguration? Servitude to faerie or a pagan god? But what would he acquiesce to? Do you really think he would allow that? Do you know him so poorly?_

_Alchemy: You send me this Shit like I can marry Agrippa to de Spina to Khunrath and emerge with the wisdom of God and an alabaster everliving brother. It is a Waste of time._

_Power: she is the first demon. Even were I to_

He looks up, fist clenched, jaw tight. Dean is snoring, buried in blankets. Only the top of his head shows, golden in the lamplight.

_Threats. Offence: Kill her first. Would that even void the deal? The Colt may be our last_

_How to get to her?_ he writes, overloading his pen, smearing ink, scratching deep into the paper. _How, how how how how how how_

Dean turns over, mattress creaking, and Sam folds the letter carefully into three and tears it to shreds.

::

He returns to the creek the next day; shoos two gossiping crows from the tree, draws a trap and circles it with salt, and fires a summons. The demon comes in the body of a child, towheaded and snotty.

Sam feels himself fail before he has even begun.

“I want to talk to Lilith,” he tries, halfhearted, and the demon subsumes itself, and his tears begin, wild and confused, and his cries for Mamá and Pipo, and Sam's exorcism comes in a shamed hurried whisper, as the demon throws the child's body against the circle of the trap before it burns its way back to Hell.

Sam carries the boy back to town on his hip. He is alive but silent, unable to talk. Sam wonders if he would have been better off dead. He had wished for it, when it had happened to him.

He knocks on the door to the church office and pushes him towards the woman who answers.

“I found him wandering,” he says, and she takes the child automatically from his arms, bewildered. 

“Where...”

“I don't know,” he says, thin, barely able to speak. “I don't know where he's from.”

Walking back up Main and the passers-by are peons, their business trite, their minds unconsumed by what has taken over his days. It seems strange to him that not everyone in the world is thinking of his brother, and demons, and a contract sealed with a kiss.

In front of the door to their private entrance is a black smudge, moving; a gecko, writhing in ants, thrashing, its tail snapping back and forth. He nudges it off the porch with his boot. 

Hitting the dirt doesn't free it.

::

“Hey, Sam,” Dean says, carefully, coming inside at the end of the day. He puts a plate on the desk, steak with sweetcorn and a few beans. A thin pool of blood has collected under the meat.

“Thanks,” he grunts, shoves it away and turns the page.

“Heard you saved a kid,” Dean says, and Sam shakes his head. He wouldn't call it saved. “So, ah. I found you a horse.”

Sam looks up from _Ammud ha-Semali._

“Huh?”

“A horse.”

“For what purpose?” He doesn't want another horse. Not ever again and he has no need for one right now anyway.

Dean shrugs, colours. “When we go...”

“What horse?”

“You know Mr Stylianou?”

“Who?”

“He has the store up by Longview, Sam. His kid can't sit that mare. He'll sell for cheap.”

Sam frowns, thinks back to that morning, heading down to the hotel for breakfast, trying to read, Dean pulling him out of the street, out of the way of hooves.

“That ewe-necked grey? The fleabitten?”

“That's the one.”

“She's fat and mean. How long's she even been under saddle?”

“I'll sort her.”

“You'll _sort_ her.”

“Yeah.”

Sam shuts his book and holds it very tightly, the paper compressing to its material limit.

“What are you doing, Dean?”

“You need a—”

“You're gonna waste your time breaking a goddamn bitch of a horse? That's what you're gonna do?”

Dean shrugs a shoulder offhand, fiddles with Sam's notes. Sam snatches them from between his fingers.

“Not like I got anything else on my dance card.”

Sam sets book and notes down carefully and stands, hands fists, grinding his knuckles into the desktop.

“You could help me. Help yourself.”

Dean's mouth tightens and he holds Sam's gaze; has the temerity to look wounded.

“You know I can't do that. Don't ask me again.”

Sam shakes his head in disbelief and Dean stares him down, defiant.

“Fine,” Sam snaps. “Go, I don't care, do whatever you want.”

Dean grabs his jacket and stalks out without looking back and four months more, four months more only does Sam have to endure this wreckage of a life. Four months and Sam will hammer a cross into the ground—or maybe he won't, maybe he'll roll Dean into a dirty muddy hole and cover him like that unmarked and unremembered and he'll ride away and be free of this, this leeching bleeding open wound, he'll close it over and ride away and be so powerful with the nothing that he feels, he will tread on air and eat lightning and grind the world under his heel, clean and blank, and nothing will hurt, anymore, ever again.

::

He slows and slows, pawing through his grammar, unwilling to trust his translation. Most of him has given up, said thank you Moses ben Solomon ben Simeon for granting me scraps of Lilith and nothing of use, thank you so much and fuck off back to Burgos while you're at it, while his fingers still turn pages and his eyes drift up to the window at the dead floating night until they get so dry that he can hear himself blink.

He goes looking for his brother, and finds him, leaning against a hitching post, hallowed by the porch lamp, chatting with the grocer's kid. Not so much a kid, as he had kindly let Sam imagine, but a young man, Hellenic and smooth, huge dark eyes fixated. As Sam watches, Dean gets him laughing and tips his hat, sets him blushing hard enough that Sam can see it twenty feet away.

He can also see his father, glaring from across the road, chest puffing up under his waistcoat.

He steps up beside Dean, and smiles tightly at the youth. 

“Excuse us.”

He grabs Dean by the elbow and walks him down the road, lets him try to tug vainly away, only releases him once they're around the corner, in the shelter of the schoolhouse, vacant and dark now it's night.

“What in hell you think you're doing?” Dean hisses, tugging his shirt straight, rubbing at his arm.

“Me? The hell you think _you're_ doing? It's a miracle we haven't already been run out of here, Dean. You'll get us both shot.”

“I was trying to get you a goddamn bargain!”

“Yeah? What were you bargaining?”

Dean's face hardens.

“Speak plain.”

Sam cocks his head.

“You ever been with a man, Dean?”

Dean colours.

“You have.” Sam sharpens his voice, cruel, humiliating. “Yeah, you have. More than once.”

Dean grits his teeth, looks away towards Main Street.

“You've been fucked.”

Dean turns to go and Sam grabs him by the shoulder, hauls him back around, his feet stuttering under him.

“You want it that bad, hey, all you gotta do is say, I'll stick it in you. But don't you go find yourself some child. That's just reckless. Stupid.”

Dean goes white, still, dangerous.

“Ply your perversions where they won't cause us trouble, _brother_ ,” Sam spits, airless and sick, dislocated, barely able to see, and Dean's shoulder hits him in his stomach and they fly back into the dirt and something breaks deep in Sam, vision gone, reason and all ties to sanity and the world, knocked out of his skull by a fist on his cheek and his head snaps back with a crack. 

He kicks and bucks with Dean's weight unsteady holding him down, barely; gets him with a flailing punch on the underside of his jaw. He rolls them and splits Dean's lip open against his teeth, his own knuckles slicing, and Dean spits blood into his eye and slaps him, open-handed over his ear, exploding in his head. 

Sam grabs him by the collar, hauls him off the ground and slams him back down, jabs two knuckles hard into his diaphragm and his eyes fly open and he tries to gasp in a breath, scrabbles to knock Sam's hands away, backhands Sam so his face is turned and then crashes his elbow to Sam's temple and Sam tumbles to the side, off him, tears of pain burning in his eyes and Dean's grabbing at him again, his face as Sam tries to bury it away, hide in his arms; Dean pulls him up to sitting, hauls him until he's nearly in Dean's lap, thumbs swiping under his eyes rough, too much, Sam tries to wrest his way clear but Dean has him by the shoulders now, his jacket.

He's still upside down, his ears ringing, his lips drawn back into a grimace, pain everywhere. 

“Shhh, shhh,” Dean says and Sam's crying, he realises, he's crying, sobbing, loud and abject and he can't get away, his shoulders trapped, cornered, and his face hurts it's so contorted, and his chest it's under such pressure, and his throat, and his soul. “Surrender, brother, surrender,” and Sam's body does so without his command, shuddering, clutching at Dean, tucking in under his chin, muffling his pain against Dean's chest, and growing small in the hold of his arms.

::

Dean has a loose tooth from the fight that annoys him. Sam can tell when he's poking at it.

They box the books and ship them west to Bobby, and point their horses south.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [translations, works referenced](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/163096084491/peregrine-chapter-6-verona-5000-words-by)


	7. Oxford - Noxubee County - Raymond

Dean takes them back to the river and Sam, whose new bitch of a mare fights the bit and carries her head too high, and whose failures are too grievous to escape, barely takes notice until they're on the ferry, upstream of Memphis, skirting its dirt and chaos. They enter Mississippi on the tip of the delta, bend east into the grey leafless uplands.

Winter is upon them.

They focus on the immediate business of survival.

Dean won't stop feeding him. Every meal now is bacon and biscuits cooked in bacon fat and gravy. He stops them for a week in Oxford, dumps them right back into a shock of people, making Sam's skin crawl with their bustle, the everyday futile circles of their lives. 

They load themselves down with oats and new sheepskins and a tarpaulin and a thick red woollen rug; and then, with what Sam suspects is the true purpose of their stay in town, they go to church.

Dean was raised by a pastor, and Sam can't blame him for playing with religion again. They join the congregation of a shaky but crowded Methodist shack for evening service, and Dean shifts restlessly and leaves halfway through the confession, causing a stir, tugging at Sam's sleeve. Sam brushes him away and lingers, _Come, Ye Disconsolate_ rising around him; stays seated as his neighbours rise for Communion; throws a dime in the hat towards the new church; lingers still, digging splinters out of the wood, as he is sent forth to do good in the world.

He feels too heavy to move.

“Son,” the pastor says, resting a hip against the pew in front of him. An old man, doing his duty. The place is otherwise empty, Sam realises. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“No,” he says, and drags his feet out of the door.

Ruby is waiting outside, fur stole almost hiding her face and her jacket buttoned up tightly. It's a costume; she doesn't feel the cold. Her small frame and apparent chill has brought a solicitous parishioner near. She bats her eyelashes at him.

Sam lifts his hat to the man as he nears and Ruby excuses herself with a curtsey, makes her way through the crowd and peers behind him.

“Where's Buffalo Bill?”

Sam tightens his lips around a retort. “I didn't see you inside.”

“As though I would.”

“Sacred ground?”

“Boring ground, more like,” she says, rolls her eyes and links her arm through Sam's as they start down the sidewalk. “If _you_ can make it through the doors I certainly can.” 

Sam disentangles himself as quietly as he's able.

“What were you going to do to that man?”

“Nothing,” she says, wounded. “Show him a good time, maybe.”

“And if he weren't a bachelor?”

“More the better,” she smirks, and sighs at Sam's dirty look. “I'm a _demon_ , Sam. Fun is in the job description.”

“Why are you here?”

She halts and pulls him around to face her; contemplates him a moment, her lashes dark in the frame of the mink, her lips blood red.

“What were you looking for in there, Sam? When are you going to wake up?”

“When are _you_ going to make yourself useful?” he growls. She narrows her eyes at him, and deliberately takes his elbow again, lifts her skirts to step down into the street, heading for a tea house across the way.

“I can't save him,” she says, quietly. Sam startles, looks at her, and she keeps her face forward, sombre, sincere as far as he can tell. “I'm sorry. I thought...”

“You said you could.”

“I said I could _help_. I can't help _him_. But I can help you.”

Sam stalls in the middle of the street. A cyclist wobbles around him and curses his mother.

“What makes you think I want your help?”

She frowns, seems hurt by his disavowal.

“I want you to be strong, Sam,” she says. “I want you to be the best you can be.”

“You make me sick,” he says, and she glares at him.

“Listen, kiddo. I know you don't want to hear this but—him, his kind, their time is over. But _you_ —”

Sam grabs her wrist and jerks her in close, feels the bones of her vessel grinding together, nothing but meat, a sack of stolen bones and an animating inhuman malignance. Like this she seems so small, bending back to get away from him; what he could do to her, with pleasure.

“If I see you again,” Sam says, “I'll kill you.”

“You talk big,” she sneers, and tries to jerk out of his grip, and he pulls her in and fists the front of her cloak, and her little boyfriend attempts to jump in between them with a cry of _Sir!_ Sam shoves him to the side.

“I swear it.”

“I put a target on my back for you, you faithless bastard,” she hisses.

“I'll kill you,” Sam snarls, sick and low, and other hands pull him back away from her, and all he sees are her dark hateful eyes in the blizzard of her stole before he turns away, is turned away, hauled by stern ruthless hands pulling out of concert, one this way, one that, his joints stretching. They take him to the end of the block, push him stumbling forward.

One of them is the Sheriff.

“Out you get, you little shitstain.” He shows his gun on his hip.

Sam picks up his hat and brushes the hair from his face, squares his shoulders, holds himself tall and looks at them, three men of outrage in their demure churchgoing best, just human, just—fucking _human_.

My brother could shoot all three of you between one blink and the next, he thinks. I would cheer. There would be no one in the world who cared to mourn you. 

It must show on his face. The Sheriff steps forward, face and hand tightening, and Sam turns his back on them and shoves his hands in his pockets and walks away waiting for a bullet that's a long time coming.

::

Sam rakes his winter leaves. Sycamore cottonwood cedar birch beech maple elm white oak in riot and glory. In drifts, that he could kick through if he were carefree, if there were not so many eyes on this street watching him. Inside Jessica is waiting.

He rakes them through the gate, cold-wrought iron, and into a heap by the front door and starts again. By evening he has a pile like sargassum on the tide. He falls into it. Above him Jessica is burning.

“Scoundrel,” she hisses, through her forked tongue.

He wakes with the dawn, a nuthatch chattering overhead. In front of his nose a snail tests and repudiates his blanket; keeps on its damp leafy course, trailing silver.

This is how they greet Christmas: far from any church. It is raining, or more fog than rain under the canopy, light and hazy in the air, the thin pine damp and quiet. They've camped on the edge of cleared land, atop a gentle rise, and slope in front of them, dormant earth, is still dusted in frost when they rise, unseen by the sun.

Christmas is not something Sam has ever particularly bothered with before, and he figures it's the same for Dean. They hadn't made a fuss last year, beyond the book Sam keeps wrapped at the bottom of his pack. But Sam does have something for him this time, and as they're drinking their coffee he stands and throws the little pouch down into Dean's lap.

Dean takes the pan off the fire and pulls off his glove with his teeth and undoes the drawstring. The cross shines in his hand, burnished copper making the sun seem warmer than it is. It's the same colour as his beard.

“Where'd you get it?” he says, quietly, looking down a long time.

“I had it made,” Sam says, and coughs. Oxford had been good for something at least.

Dean frowns, weighs it in his hands. 

“What metal is this?”

“Lead, inside,” Sam says, and wills him to stop asking questions. He's been carrying this lead a long time.

Dean scratches his nose and squints up at Sam in thought and Sam puts his hand back in his pocket and tucks the mug against his chest, looks away. At the bottom of the field smoke rises gently from a freedman's cottage. It's blurring a little.

Dean's moving; he stands, and when Sam darts a glance at him he has slipped the leather thong over his head. The cross flames even with the sun still obscured and while his eyes are sticking on that Dean brings up his cold hand to cuff him gently on his cheek.

“Thanks, Sam,” he says, a look in his eye that roots Sam to the ground, so unafraid of sentiment. Who taught him to be so free. “I love it.”

::

A week later they are keeping their heads down in a railroad town outside of Jackson, and Sam is hustling them along to the post office before the door shuts on them. Dean pauses, staring at a building across the street, and it takes Sam a moment to realise what has caught his eye.

PHOTOGRAPHS, the banner proclaims, AND EQUIPMENT, strung impermanent across the shopfront. Dean's face is reserved, considering. He looks at Sam.

“No,” Sam says, shaken, winded. “No.”

Dean shrugs a shoulder, feigning indifference.

“We could—”

“No.”

“You would—”

Sam fists the front of Dean's coat and throws him stumbling to the side, down the blind narrow alley to their right and follows at a pace, PHOTOGRAPHS AND EQUIPMENT diminishing behind them, a cat yowling, Dean yowling, mud underfoot, locks his fingers back in the front of Dean's coat and slams him against the wall.

Under the shuttered backroom window of a drygoods store with thunder rumbling in the distance he kisses his brother, catches Dean mid-curse, mouth open and hot. Dean makes a soft shocked eager noise and his arms come up, fisting Sam's clothes, grabbing into Sam's hair at the back of his neck, painful, his body arching against Sam's hard and needy.

Sam's fingers are wound in his lapels and their hats have knocked each other askew and he has the metamorphic taste of Dean on his tongue and the feel of his skin, his whiskers, and there's nothing he can do to help himself survive what it does to him. He pulls away and clutches in Dean's collar, eyes on his own white knuckles.

“I don't want a picture of you,” he says.

“But—”

“I won't be left with your memory,” Sam says, feeling his voice strain, lock, break. “I won't Dean. I won't.” 

“Okay, okay,” Dean says, hushed, and smooths at Sam's face, eyes following his hand across Sam's cheek and brow. He thumbs Sam's cheekbone and pauses; presses against Sam's lips, smearing them. His gaze is incendiary.

“Come,” Sam says, hoarse, and steps back, and Dean blinks but his eyes don't focus; Sam releases him and draws his coat about and leaves the alley at the same pace that he'd thrown Dean down it. 

It's a quarter mile through the mud back to their lodging. He doesn't look behind. The rain hits as he walks and it nurses into full blaze the starving covetous rage he still feels. If Dean is not following him he thinks he might well kill someone.

He stomps up the stairs, nearly breaks the key in the lock and still can't get in, bashing his shoulder against the door to force the swollen wood free, and stumbles inside to their dark cramped cell of a room, two poky cots and the stink of poverty.

His coat is sodden, heavy, strangling, and he wrenches it off. A button pops. Ruining it already. Casts it on the stool and the whole lot hits the ground and when he picks up the stool by its leg the seat is half wedged off, cheaply-made and insecure. He knocks it against the fireplace, twice, so it ricochets off and the whole thing splinters, and the leg still in his hand he throws into the fire and sends sparks bursting at him in a wave; a log rolls out that he kicks back in; it breaks in two and the glowing dying centre of it shines at him and bakes his skin and he feels himself take leave of his mind.

The door shuts behind him. Sam locks his fingers around the mantelpiece.

“This will happen,” he says down into the fire. “Do not deny me again.”

“ _You_ deny _me_ ,” Dean says, white heat in his voice but nothing kind or desirous. “You find women everywhere. Have you fucked the demon yet?”

Sam glares at him, revolted.

“How dare you.”

Dean nods, hangs his hat, measured and slow and infuriating.

“You will.”

Rage pounds in Sam's temples, vile, unclean.

“How fucked you are in the head to even think that.”

“The pot knows the kettle. I've never met anyone as fucked in the head as you, brother.”

Sam laughs.

“Well what a bargain you got for your soul. You must dance every night and cry the earth is good, and the stars are good and all their adjuncts are good and think yourself so lucky to visit Hell for the sake of one such as me.”

Dean pulls off his scarf in quick angry jerks, throws it towards the desk and misses.

“Come here.”

“No.”

“Come here,” Dean barks, rough, like a father, and starts on the toggles of his coat.

“I will not appease you.”

“Come _here_ , Sam.” The coat hits the floor with the scarf. The fire at Sam's back might well be under his feet, eating him whole, and his voice is shaking, livid.

“I will not be appeased. And I will not forgive you.”

“I don't ask for your forgiveness,” Dean snaps, and of course, of course he doesn't, he doesn't care. He doesn't think there's anything to forgive. Sam's fists are clenched, his knuckles straining, his bones.

“Get out.”

Dean's lips are thin and bloodless, mute. Sam grinds his teeth.

“Go. I can't be near you anymore.”

Dean's throat works and he colours.

“Go, Dean!” Sam flings his arm to point at the door behind Dean, trembling, and Dean says in an urgent breaking tumble,

“Just kiss me again Sam I—”

Sam crushes him against the door and grabs at his face and they are kissing again and Dean has him caught again, so tight and hard it doesn't even make a proper kiss, just need and wet heat and hitched breath across Sam's cheek. Sam holds him so fiercely, his fingers moulding to the shape of Dean's skull and Dean reaches up behind and lifts Sam's hat from his head, tosses it and delves his hand into Sam's hair and pulls, vicious, baring Sam's neck and slides his mouth from Sam's, bites over his jaw and sucks on his pulse.

“Holy—” Sam gasps, at the ceiling, thin through his stretched-out throat, unable to draw enough air, heart beating like a calamity and Dean takes his jaw in the hand that is not bruising Sam's scalp and holds him like that, high, vicelike, Sam's heels leaving the ground, wrecked, thrilling to his brother's strength, the sight of his arms huge in the straining fabric of his shirt. His eyes fixed black on Sam, perilously flushed, like he has Sam now and he can't tell what do to with him. His hand tightens in Sam's hair.

Sam looks down through his lashes and feels the fire take him finally.

“Get on the bed Dean.”

They are pressed close enough that he can feel what this does to his brother, can see his eyes darken further, hear the pop of his lips parting.

They don't make it to the cot.

They trip over each other in their rush and Sam topples, bangs off the desk and whacks the floor with his elbow and his arm goes numb, and Dean lands atop him and he loses his wind again. Dean reaches up to brace himself on the leg of the cot and it skates across the floor into the side table and there's a crash, the lamp and the rank stench of whale oil.

“Fuck,” Dean mutters, craning his head up to see, and Sam breaks half the buttons of his vest and shirt trying to get through one-handed, scrapes his nails across Dean's skin to make pink lines across his tattoo, the deep blue unfaded, drawing down the neck of Dean's singlet while Dean somehow hooks his legs between Sam's and pushes them apart like Sam's a girl.

“ _Oh_ ,” Sam cries, soft and involuntary, overcome by how easily it happens, Dean's need pressing him into the boards as Dean plants his forearm by Sam's shoulder and fucks down, brutal. Sam slaps the floor and bucks up under him, unbearably hard with no easy way through to satisfaction, their buckles catching and too much between them.

He starts again on Dean's clothes, gets him shirtless somehow, bareskinned and there is a wonder, evening outside and fire inside lighting his brother up like a god, the cross on its thong shining, and Dean above him is frowning down trying to navigate Sam's shirt, pulling back for space and their locked buckles twist and pinch and Dean curses and wrenches away, furious. 

Sam grabs him about the nape of his neck before he can get far, holds him tight and palms his cock with his other hand, and it's dangerous, he still itches with violence; there is no way for him to touch his brother without it becoming a clench, a clasp, a twist of flesh. He wants to bite, claw, chew; has his teeth set deep in his own lip. His desire is leviathan.

He's holding too tight with his left while he pulls up Dean with his right, so hard and getting harder, and Dean arches his neck a little and takes the pain, pushing into Sam's palm, shifting, knees either side of Sam's hips, for a stronger angle.

“Remember, Dean?” Sam pants. Back across time he'd touched his brother's cock in the same way in a church and it had been bare seconds but his hand never forgot the shape of it, had never stopped wanting and compounding the want with lack, and by the noise Dean makes and the helpless way he collapses back down onto Sam he remembers for sure, remembers well. “You been thinking about it?”

“You know I have,” Dean says, thin, tortured, closing his fingers around Sam's shoulder, his face in Sam's neck.

“You been touching yourself, thinking about it?”

“You know I do,” Dean gasps, grinding down into Sam's hand, and Sam knows nothing of the sort, hadn't dreamed it, hadn't dared to think; it hits him in the chest like a mortar and his cock throbs, wet, his balls drawing up and he knocks his head on the ground and gasps _wait wait_ , grabs himself about the base and tries to come back from the cliff.

“Sam,” his brother breathes in awe, no sweeter way Sam has ever heard his name, his arms now bracing himself above and Sam fumbles at their belts and flies and watches Dean's eyes flutter closed and the intake of his held breath as Sam touches him finally, finally comes to know the silk of his brother's skin and the way it moves and how thick Dean is and how hard, how vast his need. How much he wants Sam to touch him.

Dean spreads his knees, arches his back up to make more room and lets Sam stroke him two-handed, long and fast, hook his own cock in to drag alongside and they both whimper and Dean cradles his cheek and opens his mouth and licks deep into Sam, swallowing the groans Sam makes, gone, his mouth and his cock, every nerve alight and unbelieving.

“You left me,” Dean hisses, and scrapes his teeth across Sam's lip. They both taste blood.

“What,” Sam gasps, too high to be sure he's hearing right, “no I didn't.”

“In Verona. For weeks. How could you?”

Sam lifts his hips, trying to be closer, his cock skidding along Dean's belly, painting it, and the smell of sex between them, together.

“What? I was there.”

“No,” Dean says, hoarse, and digs his forehead to Sam's, pants humid breath against his cheek, and his hips are moving fretfully now, pushing himself into Sam's hand. “You weren't. You come and go like a beaten dog.”

Sam throws his calf over the back of Dean's thigh, crushes them close, no escape, barely any room to move. He twists his grip, holds, jerks short and sure over the head and pulls a deep rumbling moan out of Dean and Christ, this man Sam has in his hands, his power, his beauty.

“I'm here now,” he whispers.

“Yeah.” Dean nudges blindly at Sam's cheek and kisses his jaw, the corner of his mouth and brings a hand down to join the fun, slipping around Sam's, wrists knocking and knuckles brushing, his thumb running up the vein, pressing under the head, massaging, insistent as Sam leaks, rubbing through it, making Sam squirm, lose his rhythm. “Yeah, fuck yeah, you are, Sam, Sammy,” a climbing surge, working together, so desperate, so fast they're halfway back to the pain of before, the sure edge of certainty, nothing outside of this, of them.

“Here, Dean, I'm here,” he pants, and Dean's big hand is the only thing he knows, and Dean's lips on his, and Dean's cock pulsing hot on his belly, up his wrist, and the bright release and relief as he comes, neck bent back and straining, and clear air entering his lungs for the first time in an eternity.

::

A bell rings out midnight. It is 1882. Dean has seventy-four days.

Sam sits in the dark on the edge of the cot, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely in front of him, and tries to talk to God. The part of his body that thought it knew how to pray is missing, a gap, his soul shifted.

Calloused fingers brush his back. They are crammed into this narrow precarious affair, had climbed up together and dozed, dreamless and entwined, rain drumming the shingles above, snapping at the window panes.

“I saw there's a service in the morning, if you want to go.”

“I never needed a church to practice my faith in, Dean.”

“Sure,” Dean says, and his thumb keeps smoothing over Sam's spine. Sam tongues at the tear on the inside of his lip and tastes iron again and thinks about how many miles have fallen under his feet to bring him here. How much blood his hand has spilled.

“If it ever was faith,” he says.

“What's that mean?”

Sam shrugs. His heterodoxy is more instinct than code, more a sense of the shape of things than anything he's ever sat down and worked out. He's always known there was evil. His faith was always the hope there was something good too.

“God never brought me anything.”

“You can't say that.”

“You're the only one who ever—”

“God brought you to me,” Dean says, and pulls at his shoulder. All they have to see by is the fire, mostly coals now, heat but no light, and it turns Dean into something exotic, epic, rise and fall of his lips and the flight of his lashes, his face all curves and shadows, flickering, a mystery. He is frowning. Sam touches his brow, tries to smooth it.

“I would have found you anyway,” he says. “You were mine before you were His.”

Dean shakes his head, and the frown deepens.

“I was baptised, Sam. That's blasphemy.”

“I _am_ a blasphemy,” Sam says, and bends back down to him, and shows him the truth of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [works referenced](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/163133230956/peregrine-chapter-7-oxford-noxubee-county)


	8. Alexandria - Calcacieu Parish

They flee the wreck they made of their room and stumble west in short bursts, too hungry to push a full day's ride if conditions permit sleeping out. They fall into each other in a burned-out barn in the lowlands, their hands still mean and grasping; in a natural clearing uphill of the Yazoo they cram between bedrolls and blankets, under daylight cloud, firing so much heat together Sam rises and lets the blanket spill from his back, and watches the sight consume Dean. 

He learns the taste of Dean's mouth in rain and sleep and humour and thirst. He learns what it is to have Dean go to his knees, and he learns what it is to go to his knees himself, eager as a saint.

By firelight or starlight or the lazy eye of a bayou noon Dean is the most staggering thing Sam has ever seen, will ever see. Sam whispers how beautiful thou art, my darling, into his mouth, and takes a punch on the shoulder, and laughs; behold, thy hair is as a flock of goats appearing from Mount Gilead. Dean rolls his eyes, squirms and call him a fool.

There are things Sam would like to ask his father, if he could. He thinks they have more in common now.

In Alexandria, in a rotting hotel at the far edge of town, he fucks Dean for the first time. Dean slides the bottle of oil into his palm and Sam looks down, confused, not wanting to clean the guns, and Dean is still standing there, and when Sam doesn't understand, turns shy and swallows, eyes fixed over Sam's shoulder.

“If you don't want to,” he says, and Sam says “I want to I want to,” in a rush, cursing his inexperience and battling with his fright, unsure exactly which he is agreeing to. He detects still some shame on Dean's face and recalls his words back in Verona, takes tight grip of his regret and sets it aside.

“Dean, yes, please,” he says, soft, and takes him down to the bed, and figures it out as he goes along.

It steals his breath clear out of his lungs, how swiftly Dean turns over. How tight he is around Sam's finger, wet with the oil. Sam nudges him up onto his knees and knows that whoever had this before never really had it: saw the same bowed and held strength, maybe, and coveted as well the span of his back and the curve of his spine, and wished to make him shiver, but they had him under a borrowed name and a counterfeit brotherhood. 

And now he is Sam's.

“Here's what I think,” he whispers, leaning over. Dean's skin is glowing, and when Sam presses in with a second finger he can see Dean's eyes flutter closed, the rapid bob of his throat. “I think our father knew your Jim Murphy, and he left you with him, and you ran, you ran away to find me.”

“Yeah,” Dean gasps. “Yes.”

“You were just a baby yourself but you went looking for me.”

“Sam,” he moans, and Sam gets the radical idea to move his fingers, inside, push apart, crook, and can see that Dean loves the stretch, is so hungry for Sam he can't think.

“You needed me. But you got lost yourself.”

Dean groans and pushes back and says do it, do it, asking the impossible, surely, there's no way Dean could take him, and Sam is too hurried, makes a mess with more oil running down Dean's thighs and any remaining fear turns to need, greed: he is so hard he can't stand it; and Dean wants it.

“I found you,” he says, heart pounding sore, and presses inside, hot, Dean's body yielding slow and slick and ruinous around the head of his cock. “Found you, brother,” and this does something to Dean, like a string cut, like he's broken in on himself, dropping down to his elbows, a sob sitting in the base of his throat strangling out as Sam seats himself fully.

“Brother,” he says again, just to see what it will do, and Dean's whole body shudders under him, clenches around him; it transmutes into Sam with such force that Sam bucks and slams into him again, it would have to hurt, it would have to, Dean makes a bright pained sound and his head bows, baring his neck. An arm comes up to brace on the wall.

“Okay?” Sam whispers, and Dean's fingers twitch against the wallpaper almost delicately, _hang on_ , and Sam's not sure he can, he needs to move, and he slides his hand up the sweat on Dean's back and chants, “okay Dean, okay,” as Dean picks himself up, and sets a careful pace, deliberate, flexing, finding his place inside Dean. God, he's tight. 

He grabs Dean's hipbone and nudges impossibly deeper, shifting, his balls sliding on Dean's skin, and Dean gasps his name on a gutted intake of breath and he's so sweet around Sam. Sam shatters. Bends over him, fucking, hard and fast, pure. Licking salt away and saying _brother_ into the skin of his neck as he moans, deep and rasping. Reaching down to jerk him and he comes at the first touch with a hoarse inarticulate shout, quaking, in waves, and Sam follows him, as he cannot help but do.

They fall to the mattress; regain their broken wind, and separate, and Dean turns away, draws the blankets up high over his shoulder until he's just hair left. Sam, his heart still in recovery, lies next to him, in his heat, bent artfully around the wet spot. He stares at the ceiling. 

He didn't want to bring shame into their bed.

It's always been a talismanic word for Dean. Sam cares about it only insofar as he does. He will take Dean any way he can get him. Brother or partner, stranger or friend. Every word is as thin and dependent as the next.

He rolls and slides his hand over Dean's side, spreads his palm and hauls Dean back against his chest, skin to skin, miles of him, sweaty, oily, damp and humid under the blankets. Rests his chin on Dean's shoulder and whispers.

“That was good.”

“Course it was,” Dean mumbles, after a long moment. “Best you ever had.”

“You bet,” Sam says, and noses behind his ear, kisses his hair. “Best I ever had.”

::

“So,” his fathers say, disgust and pride. “You've commenced to fucking him.”

“To unman your own brother,” says one.

“What a trophy,” says the other.

Sam ignores them. He is watching Dean bathe. In a tub; in a waterfall; in the ocean, naked, rising and falling with the waves, foam dissolving on his shoulders under a high noon sun, vital as a god, his soul so bright it hurts to see.

“He's given up; he's laying down,” remarks the one.

“He's chosen sin over valour,” nods the other.

“There are stains that can never be cleansed,” they chorus.

Sam sheds his jacket and steps forward across the sand, and lifts his hand so he can see Dean clearly.

::

There's no way Dean's getting on a horse. Sam telegraphs Bobby first thing, and the Western Union boy knocks on their door after lunch with his reply.

NO PROGRESS. B.TALBOT REQ HELP. RETURN FIRST TRAIN.

Sam crumples the paper and leaves it on the table, and sorts the fire.

It's not long before Dean returns, laden with coffee beans and corn. He dumps them with the packs and runs his hand up the back of Sam's shirts, tentative like he expects not to be allowed. Sam nods at the table, and misses his hand when it goes.

Dean unballs the telegram. Brings it to the fire and tosses it in, watches it burn. The level of gratitude Sam feels is frightening.

“Maybe we should,” Sam says, reluctant, and Dean keeps his eyes on the flames. 

“No.”

Sam swallows.

“You shouldn't let me ignore it.”

“Can't we just have—” Dean cuts himself off, rubs at his face.

“The things I would do, Dean. The things I would let happen.”

“Fuck's sake, Sam,” Dean sighs, irritated. “Don't be so afraid of yourself that you throw the reins to me. Or that _demon_. You make your own choices.”

Sam draws himself up tall and scowls. List for me the things over which I have had control, he wants to spit. List for me the joys in my life and the myriad paths that spread before me. You will not need to refill your pen.

“We know how this ends, _brother_ ,” he says, and watches Dean flinch. “I have always known. If you think this life is a straight line you are stupider than I imagined.”

Dean glares at him, appalled.

“Goddamn, you're an asshole.”

“You're just learning this?”

“No,” Dean snaps, and, remarkably, grins. “I knew it already. Ah, Sam,” he says, and Sam tries and fails to hang on to his anger, any righteousness slipping from his fingers, “ah, Sam, brother.” He cuffs Sam on the cheek, pinches as Sam smiles against his will. “We are what we are, I suppose.”

“You're a fool is what you are,” Sam says, “I reject you entirely,” and Dean keeps that knowing grin on his face and sidles in close, and Sam backs against the wall, spreads his feet and lets himself forget anything beyond the press of his brother's body and his bracketing arms and the wicked wanting light in his eye.

::

In the back of John Winchester's journal is a coded list of wayhouses; one, in Calcacieu Parish, has the name Frances Devereaux by it. Devereaux is known to Sam as a man who has dealt with demons, and a good researcher besides. The list is over a decade old and half of it is unverified, but if it's not wrongfooted hearsay, and if he's alive, and if he's willing to break his seclusion and talk—

The cabin is where it's supposed to be but the water is high and wayfinding takes longer than they expected, and Sam is riding under the burden of a week of dreams and he is just so tired. Sunset already under the towering bare cypress and he just wants to get there, and when Bitch balks at the swamp he kicks her and she plants her front half and bucks him right off into the mud.

She stares down at him and snorts scornfully.

Dean laughs too, and takes her reins, makes Sam trudge through, and he remounts on the other side dripping mud all down her and it's almost dark by the time they get to the cabin.

It's empty; years abandoned. Sam is too beaten to be disappointed. Dean fetches water for him to wipe Bitch down, and he dries her and hobbles her and staggers up the porch where Dean is waiting with another bucket.

“Bend over, catfish.”

Sam obeys. Dean tips it over his head, sluices through his hair, and then pulls him inside dripping, shivering, teeth chattering. He is filthy and he stinks of mud and filth and rot and his boots are probably halfway to growing barnacles.

Dean has the fire going and guides him to it, more water warming there. Musty grey rug on the floor. He doesn't even want to think how long since it's been beaten free of dust.

“I'm tired, Dean.”

“No way you're sleeping like that,” Dean says, and strips him, turning him around and taking a look. “No leeches at least.”

“Oh, no,” Sam moans, disgusted, and Dean grins at him. He finds a cleanish rag amongst their gear and dips it in the pail, washes him down, scrubs his face and his chest. 

Sam shivers, water only lukewarm and cooling as it runs and Dean follows the trails, washes his groin perfunctorily, lifts his feet backwards like he's checking Sam's hooves. Sam puts a hand on his back to balance and looks around the cabin, dark, spare, a cot without a mattress, shelves without tins or jars or bottles, an empty lidless chest, a table with two chairs.

“There aren't even any books here,” he complains, and sags, closes his eyes. Eighty miles and a dunking for nothing.

“You kidding?” Dean says, queer slant to his voice, distracted. “Can't leave books in a cabin. The gators sniff them out and start breaking windows.”

“That's...” Sam sways on his feet, fogheaded, and can't be bothered finishing.

Dean drops the rag back in the bucket and then there are other buckets and raking coals and more logs. The fire blazes. Dean grabs a blanket and jabs at Sam until he moves, unrolls it on the rug.

“What're you—”

“You're a mess,” Dean says, voice still taut. “Lie down. On your back.”

Sam's not really listening and Dean has to press him down, kneels by him and wrings the rag until it's damp and warm, starts at Sam's neck, scrapes crusted mud from under his ear, turns his chin to wipe down the cords of his neck. Across his scar, his brand, his nipple, wet warm rough drag, and Sam wakes up, blinking, to the sight of Dean's face, intent on his work, refreshing his cloth and picking Sam's arm up like it belongs to him, cleaning between Sam's fingers, the skin of his elbow, his armpit. Sam controls the tickle.

Sam has moles that he scrubs at, to make sure, one on his biceps that when it won't wipe away from rag or thumb Dean leans down and kisses, his lips soft, and another on his chest, and Sam who had believed himself too tired for thought let alone action feels his cock stir just from this, fire lit under his skin as Dean licks his nipple, his belly clenching tight.

“Look at you,” Dean whispers, drawing back. His eyes, dark, stick on Sam's chest, dropping lower. “Have you any idea how much—you plagued me. Knowing you has been a torment.”

“Dean,” Sam says, a whine, flushing all over, hard now, aching.

“You overtook me. From the first.”

Sam groans, lifts his hand to Dean's head and presses down and Dean ducks out from under it.

“Greedy,” he chides, and winks, eyes crinkling, leans away to rewet his cloth, leaves Sam bare and needing. “Turn over.” 

He nudges at Sam's side and Sam does what he says, knee crooked so his cock isn't so painfully trapped, and Dean starts again at the top, the nape of his neck, and wherever his cloth goes his mouth follows; he finds much to pay attention to across Sam's shoulders, and Sam is ruining their blanket, twitching against it, leaking, his balls full.

Dean traces wet electric webs across his back, follows his spine; kisses the scar. Sam squirms under the press of his lips, overheated, weak. 

“No,” he whispers, and Dean seems to understand, moves away, down, to the cleft of his ass, between.

“Fuck,” Sam gasps, shocked, curdling at the intimacy, “oh fuck Dean, oh Lord,” Dean's tongue inside him. “Oh, Lord, spare me,” pressing back helplessly into Dean's face, Dean's hands high on his thighs holding him apart, breached again, again, again, and all of him white madness, a fury around what Dean is doing to him, annihilation.

Dean turns him, urgent, forceful, while he's still shuddering through it, still pulsing, pulls himself out of his trousers, dark and as hard as Sam's ever seen him, rises on his knees and pumps himself, twice, spends himself blood-warm across Sam's cock, his belly, rubbing against Sam as he softens and Sam reaches down to help him, their hands a mess together, and their come, their sweat, their desire, their life.

::

They lay stretched out naked in front of the fire. Dean had cleaned him again, eventually, working carefully through the folds of his skin, his curling clinging hair as Sam drifted, dozy, too far gone to say no don't, leave it there forever. Leave us there forever.

Dean's head rests on Sam's stomach, a comforting weight. Sam's leg is hooked around his body, ankle on the back of his knee.

“You gotta go back to Eldorado. Afterwards.”

“Fuck you,” Sam murmurs.

“Fuck you!” Dean lifts his head and glares at Sam. “Bobby will look after you.”

“There's nothing for me there, Dean, don't be obtuse.”

“I don't say there's anything there for you. I say they'll keep you alive.”

It's the first time Dean has acknowledged that there will, apparently, be an afterwards that Sam will have to survive. It almost feels like a victory. Sam pictures riding back into that town, leading Dean's girl, her saddle empty. He feels ill.

“I know how to stay alive,” he says, and Dean cocks his head, but says nothing until the next night, rested and fire-warm and full-bellied, having hauled the rushbottom chairs over to the hearth to eat.

“Your girl in Boston died,” he says carefully, and Sam jolts, stares at him, stricken. Dean looks apologetic but continues. “What did you do then?”

Sam tilts his head back to the ceiling, rough-hewn pine.

“Went looking for my father.”

“And?”

“He got shot three days before I made it to him.”

Dean swallows, looks like he regrets saying anything.

“And then I did two more years of looking and found you.”

Dean's cheeks redden, and he drops his eyes. Sam wants to sneer at his cowardice.

“So you see,” Sam says, “what you've done to me.”

Dean's eyes are still downcast.

“I had to, Sam.”

“Reason is not justification,” Sam says, and Dean looks so low, so pale, so far from his initial certitude. Sam rises and stumbles to him.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” he whispers into Dean's mouth, bending over, throws a leg over his lap and Dean pulls him in secure, on the creaking chair, on the dusty rug, in the cabin in Calcacieu Parish, carving their time into someone else's abandoned home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [works referenced](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/163173735936/peregrine-chapter-8-alexandria-calcacieu-parish)


	9. Southwest

It doesn't take long to lose a year in a country as big as America.

There are days, so many of them, where Sam can barely see through the pinpoint dissociated rage that makes every surface glint, every shadow void. 

He tries to summon Ruby and is roundly ignored, standing impotent over the sigils, watching the spell burn to ash. A stick of rosemary bows and crumbles mockingly. 

He should never have sent her away. The mistake is too huge to even be called one. It crucifies him, to have been so righteous about a purity he didn't have, had never had. A folly that could topple empires.

He tries to summon Lilith, one palm sweating on the grip of the Colt, the other sunk into a bucket of kid's blood. He feels her brush off the call like he's an ant.

He summons a reaper, and fails to make her see his point.

“Death is death,” she says. Her eyes seem kind. Sam's hand clenches around the gun.

“Not for me.”

A breeze starts up. Her hair doesn't move, thick and black, framing her face. “Your death was transferred, not annulled.”

“Transfer it back.” She tilts her head and does nothing. “Or do you not have that power? Are you that weak?”

She smiles, or something like it, a small twitch of her lips. “You lovers are all the same. He is not the first beloved I have taken, child. Nor the millionth.”

“Not like him. There are none like him.”

She shifts her eyes beyond his shoulder, considering; gives him a moment to hope. When she looks back her face is closed and implacable.

“Be that as it may. I have a role, and one path only.”

“As do we all,” he says, raising the Colt. His words come out far from how he intends, tremulant, questioning. He takes her fathomless silence to mean yes.

“Do you—” His throat closes up. It feels like his last shot, all he has left in his belt. “Do you speak with God?”

“We will,” she says. “When it is His turn.”

“Please,” he says, and breaks, stumbling towards her chill, the vastness of her being. “Help me, is there nothing—” 

“You know him,” she says. “Of all the children of earth, you know him. Count that a privilege. Count that enough.”

“No,” he says, and her mouth turns down, and she gives up on him and is gone, and the shifting wind makes the tears on his face bright and cold, carries his words away. “I will not.”

::

“Bobby,” Dean says, hesitant, as they shelter in the roofless storehouse of an abandoned fort, from the war before last. They have lit a fire and made themselves a nest of blankets, settling down after dinner.

Sam shakes his head.

“Don't start that, Dean.” Eyes still on the page but he can sense Dean gearing up for another round.

“Your Dallas girlfriend then.”

“Don't.”

“You're gonna need looking after.”

Sam marks his place and shuts the book, rolls to his knees and climbs over him, their limbs sliding together, blocking the fire, his breath dark within, Dean's eyes wide and sparking.

“You know after my father died,” Sam says, low and even, “I hunted down four men and killed them in cold blood. Who knows what I would have been if I hadn't met you Dean. Who knows what I'm gonna be without you.”

Dean frowns, his body tense and held up against Sam's.

“No, Sam. Not revenge. Don't get into that. Promise me.”

Sam raises an eyebrow.

“Revenge? What I did to those men? Brother,” he says, and lowers himself closer, dips down, nudges the underside of his jaw, bites at his collar, teeth closing on the fabric to pull it aside and show more of him. “That's nothing compared to what I'm gonna do to anyone that touches you. That's a joke.”

Dean's throat moves as he swallows.

“Don't, Sam. I'm just a gun, and I'm past my time twice now.”

“They can come for you,” Sam says, and licks up Dean's neck, where his beard is short and fine.

“They will, you gotta believe—”

“They can try.” He slips his hand up Dean's shirt, feels Dean shiver at the cold. 

“It's gonna go hard for you if you can't—” Dean breaks off and whines, his arm coming up to brace over Sam's shoulder.

“Hard?” Sam asks, hand to Dean's cock, feeling him respond.

“You gotta accept—”

Sam cuts him off with a kiss, the soft hot inside of his mouth, and Dean presses up against him full-bodied, needful, and rolls them, makes Sam take his weight.

His skin tastes of sweat and dust, the thick unwashed horsey smell of him, not pretty and airless but real and Sam opens his legs, wraps them around Dean's hips and pulls him close.

“Are you sure,” Dean whispers, searching his eyes, and Sam doesn't know to to say it: if there were a way for him to carve open his body, to spread his ribs and pull Dean inside entirely he would do it in a heartbeat; this will have to suffice, and it turns out to be a revelation, accompanied by the sting of revelation, waking into a painful new knowledge of oneself and the world. Dean is big, and to have him inside is unspeakable, primeval, absolute and terrifying.

His legs are wedged up into some kabbalistic arrangement and his hands are searching for stable purchase, scrabbling across wool and discarded shirt and rock and his body is open and full, and Dean is panting harsh above him, the fire shining in his sweat, the cross jerking along Sam's skin as they move, slick and easy but there is pain there too and that seems fitting: every second beggars him, surprise and absurdity and how deeply he can accommodate, and how he can't move, can't control or suppress the feeling. It keeps happening, it just keeps _happening_ , and the only direction he can move is towards it.

He clutches at Dean's back, nails scraping, trying to pull him deeper, and Dean knocks his forehead to Sam's, moans, mouth scraping across Sam's, and slams in hard.

“Jesus, Sam.”

“I'll kill them all,” he whispers, wanton, shameless and free, lifting his hips as best he can to work with Dean, and Dean's lips part, eyes afire with how much Sam wants him, Sam's power, how heedless Sam is of any morality or good. “I'll tear this world down brick by brick.”

Dean shifts his weight, fumbles a hand across Sam's face, fingers in his mouth; his pace slows, maddening, ceaseless, timed to Sam's breath.

“No one else,” he growls, overwhelming inside Sam, pushing him apart, and storming wild above, too much, Sam can't— “No one else, I'll know, I'll know, I'll find them.”

He releases Sam's mouth and Sam gasps, “I swear, I swear, I swear,” so close, fighting for it. “ _Please_.”

“Relax, brother,” Dean pants, and somehow Sam does, lets his body sway into something more accepting, unbounded, lets his brother use him, fuck him and fuck him some more until he's just a body, a vessel, and the pain goes, and something else arrives, nameless, so exquisite it lifts him out of thought entirely. He's never been anywhere so good.

His balls draw up tight; he comes like a punch and that sets Dean off, scrabbling at Sam's shoulders for any leverage to get deeper, slamming, no air in Sam's lungs, no air in the world. Dean's muscles seize as he comes, straining, red-faced, and then he starts moving again, immediately wetter, embarrassingly sloppy, Sam through his own tremors can feel him softening and he prises his legs from where they're hooked and brings him down for a kiss, his eyes still closed and with the change he slips free and makes a mournful sound into Sam's mouth that Sam blushes over. He rolls them and keeps kissing.

Sam's hair falls on either side of his face, brushing the shirt they used as a pillow, making a dark curtain, a shelter. Dean gleams faintly.

He is too alive to leave Sam. Too beautiful. It would be the grossest violation of nature to lose him. The globe would turn backwards in horror. Rivers would run uphill. Dogs lay down with cats. The land storm grey and dead and ceaseless in its harrow.

“What were you thinking?” he whispers, and Dean's eyes are too soft and full to bear.

“Don't you know?”

Sam turns his face away, aching, still thrumming with pleasure and the stretch of where his brother has been and heartsick in every bone, his whole body a quarrel, as Dean's hand settles heavy on the rise of his back to press him down, chest to chest, breath to breath, beat to beat.

::

There's a piano playing a cowboy jangle, stuck on one ringing note, and smoke is thick and frozen in the air. Sam makes holes in it as he passes through. This bar is barely more than a hovel. Men are diving away from a table in the corner, their bodies arcing like a fountain. Sam steps between them and comes upon the four gunmen, each in a shooter's crouch, guns smoking, aiming at nothing.

The giant John Winchester is on the floor. His gun hasn't cleared his holster. His arm is still in its sling, his lashes and beard black against his greying skin, and his blood is pooling, reaching, seeking the waves of the floorboards, finding runnels and low points to coil, gaps to drip down and down.

The four men have ashen rag masks where their faces should be, shadows for mouths. Sam's father steps up behind Sam, rests his hand on his shoulder.

“The things I do for you,” he says.

::

Walking the desert trails or stirring breakfast or watching Dean bed down for the night Sam tries to calculate how many hours he's wasted and can't get the variables to settle. Does he count the sex? Sleep? Eating? Books he suspected would be fruitless but read anyway? Two decades in ignorance of the true scope of loss that was his birthright? Prayers he wasted on a Father who didn't care to listen, to hold a protecting hand out to the best of his Creation?

Who could make peace with such injustice?

He lies on his front and cracks his book, tilting towards the fire, and scratches at his stubble. Dean captures his hand and pulls it away gently, puts his own fingers there and tugs at the hair.

“You trying to turn into a mountain man?”

“Shaving takes too long,” Sam says, absently, and Dean makes a wounded noise and leans forward into a kiss. Sam opens for him easy and acquiescent, pulls Dean's breath into his lungs.

He hopes God is watching. He hopes a window in Hell opens on this so his father can see, and scream all my plans are failed, my seed fallen to ruin, my legacy in tatters. 

He shifts down Dean's body, to where Dean is already hard, to where anticipation and the feeling he has for Sam has him ready, every time. Every time they do this, every time they look or touch with intent he can see and feel Dean respond like it's the first time.

Their bodies know. Even if they had a thousand years together it would be like this. Just being between his legs has Sam's mouth watering, his throat sore already, has him filling at the thought of taking Dean deep, deeper than anyone is supposed to be.

A hand, combing Sam's hair back from his forehead. Dean's eyes on him, considering.

“Hard,” he murmurs. "Deep,” and Sam flushes, to be known so well. Rises to his knees, helps Dean stand and accepts the hand around his skull, that presses him into the front of Dean's underclothes. The smell of him is unbelievable.

He lets Dean into his mouth, and loses himself.


	10. Near La Cuesta

Time scatters and Sam's thoughts scatter, leaves on clattering cobblestone, flurries on a mountain, sand in the desert.

The days lengthen. The mesquite buds.

They keep west across the prairies, shedding themselves of the world. Sam is loaded down with goofer dust to confuse their trail and has some idea of a sacred space. The nearest he can think of is the mouth of an arroyo in the north of New Mexico Territory, the land big enough maybe to get lost in, to hold his sorrow.

The sky is vast, a thin dusting of clouds so high and white and frozen that they might be a painting imposed on the world, someone else's dream with Sam trapped inside, walking a ready-laid trail.

How did this happen? 

Is this all he's here for?

The nights are cold but during the day, when the sun's on them, they shuck their jackets, lay them across their pommels. Dean keeps his head high, eyes narrowed against the glare but there's contentment on his face with the horizon in sight.

He's tanning, his freckles returning in abundance, battling the dust. He shaves his beard. His profile, regular, perfect, haunts Sam's periphery. He seems as ancient and strong as the land, in his prime, Apollonian, and Sam stares at him for hours, trying to imprint him, besieged by the knowledge that this will fade; he knows well enough how indistinct and overtaken by feeling these memories get.

He should have allowed that photograph when he had the chance. Another mistake.

All of that during the day, and then at night, Sam has Dean naked, the truest version of himself, the bow of his legs, his wide flat stomach, his powerful chest, the heft of his cock and the way he soaks up Sam's care. In the night and then as they close on their destination in the day as well.

“Firm masculine coulter it shall be you,” Sam murmurs, braced above him, jerking him slow, taunting. “Whatever goes into the tilth of me it shall be you,” and Dean, through his bliss, blinks at him, bewildered. Sam smiles, bends down, cheek to cheek, skin to skin, and continues without thinking. “You my rich blood,” and closes his eyes, pained, hides in Dean's shoulder, swallows down his idiocy.

Dean, unknowing, chuckles, shakes his head and dismisses Sam's madness as he always does, grabs his hair and pulls him back mouth to mouth. Tangles their legs and twists and puts Sam on his back.

“You remember the first time—”

Sam nods, runs his palm up Dean's side, takes his throat in hand, feels his pulse kick up. He remembers, that Mississippi hotel, feels it like it was a week ago, a decade; he's exhausted the memory already. Dean shifts above him, grooving his hips down so that they're trapped together, sliding alongside, so close to perfect it sends Sam out of his mind.

“And you just, you just inhaled that stew, thought you were trying to drown yourself in it—”

“Stew,” Sam echoes, baffled, and then he goes even further back, the first time he saw Dean, the first time he killed a man in his presence, the first time he sat across a table from his brother and thought So there's beauty in this world after all. 

“I knew then, Sam, I knew, without knowing it.”

“That I would kill you?”

Dean bites, sharp, the corner of his jaw.

“That I wasn't gonna be lonely any more.”

“Selfish,” Sam chokes, and Dean accepts this charge with clear eyes and conscience.

“Yes,” he says, puts his hand to Sam and helps him find relief, works them together like they've practiced, like they're meant to be. Afterwards Dean lays back and Sam throws his thigh over Dean's, digs his fingers under Dean's far shoulder so that his weight stops Sam from falling away. He kisses all the skin he can find, lazy drags of his lips. His heart won't cease its keen.

“This is what you wanted?”

“No, Sam, Sammy, no.” Dean brings up a hand to thumb his cheek, cranes to look at him. “What I wanted.… I wanted a porch for us. A few head of cattle. Or really...just to ride. Ride and ride and ride.”

“Dean,” he says, breaking. Turns his face to kiss into Dean's palm.

“Right off the ends of the earth,” Dean says. His lips tremble, but he doesn't look away. “And we'd be laughing.”

::

This is the end of the world, he says, although not out loud.

His fathers say, It will be.

::

They watch the sunset fire the sky, wordless, and rise, and arm themselves. Throw sage on the fire and circle the camp with goofer dust. Dean whispers secrets to his girl. The chamber of the Colt only has two bullets, no matter how many times Sam checks. And his hollow shivering self is devoid of power, no matter how often he turns inside to seek it.

Dean is listening, still, head cocked, to a wind Sam can't hear. 

“Remember what I said.” His eyes are wide and clear, panic under the calm. “Be good. Be good, Sammy. Look after my girl. Look after yourself.”

Sam shakes his head, and speaks for good measure, “no, no, no, no, no.”

A howl, from out by the sun, and then another, from the north. 

Sam checks the chamber.

Another. South.

“Coyote,” Sam says, voice cracking, and Dean smiles at him. He's frightened, and riding the fright so that Sam can see his love. “ _Dean_.” 

Dean grabs the front of his shirt and pulls him in, breathes against his lips.

“This has been my best time, Sam. The best time I ever had.”

“Then _stay_ ,” Sam pleads, helpless, no giant no sinner no man. No son. No crusader. No lover no brother no friend. A child, choking on tears. And Dean, God, Dean says,

“I can't.”

And then he is gone, and Sam remains. And he is nothing at all.

::

The end. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [works referenced.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/163250456941/peregrine-chapter-10-near-la-cuesta-1000-words)

**Author's Note:**

> feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
> [A rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/163250477691/el-dorado-series)


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